AlterNet.org: World Newshttp://feeds.feedblitz.com/alternet_world
enhttp://users.feedblitz.com/7cac552a450f83864c6413641f68cb51/logo.gifAlterNet.org: World Newshttp://feeds.feedblitz.com/alternet_world
http://www.alternet.org/world/libya-spiraling-bloodshed-and-disasterLibya Is Spiraling into Bloodshed and Disasterhttp://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/239981670/0/alternet_world

Two major Arab cities fell on Tuesday – Aleppo (Syria) to the Syrian Arab Army and Sirte (Libya) to the militia armies of Misrata. One of the common features of these battles is the sheer destruction of the cities. Sirte, which was under siege since May, is rubble. Its infrastructure – including hospitals and mosques – is gone. Aleppo’s main bazaar and many of its residential areas have simply been erased. These cities resemble Fallujah (Iraq) after the United States twice razed large parts of it the ground. There is much here that resembles Kobané (Syria) after ISIS had been chased out of this city by US airstrikes and Kurdish militia ground operations. Great cities reduced to ruin. It is as if the Mongol Horde or the Crusades had returned. ‘All cities must be razed,’ said Genghis Khan. His commandment echoes from North Africa to West Asia.

The Syrian Arab Army, as I noted last week, will consolidate its hold on Aleppo before making a gradual pivot eastwards toward Raqqa. It is clear that the government in Damascus wants to move towards that ISIS stronghold before the Iraqis, backed by the West, take Mosul (Iraq). The Syrian government fears – as I am told – that the West, perhaps with Turkish military forces, will turn their attention to Raqqa after Mosul. If the West and the Turks move on Raqqa, it would mean the formal dismemberment of Syria, something that the Damascus government opposes. If there is Turkish military involvement, it would mean the end of any Kurdish ambitions to maintain the Rojava enclave of Kurdistan. The race for Raqqa will come within the year. Mosul – a city with a million people – will take time to conquer. Portents of great devastation are already apparent. For every news story on atrocities in Aleppo, there is one that is not written on what is happening in the march into Mosul.

Meanwhile, celebrations in Libya over the defeat of ISIS in Sirte are premature. ISIS took that city – Muammar Qaddafi’s hometown – in early 2015. Many of the ISIS fighters had fled Syria, where they had gone from Northern Africa to join the Caliphate. The moment the United States began to bomb ISIS targets in Syria, many foreign fighters returned home. They brought with them their commitment to their cause. Some went back to Europe, where a few conducted terror attacks. Others returned to Tunisia and to Libya, where they both conducted terror attacks and helped ISIS seize tracts of territory in both countries. It was these returnees, joining with fraternal extremists from Derna and Benghazi, who marched into Sirte in 2015. Defeats are never merely defeats. When the al-Qaeda’s Mujahideen Shura Council expelled ISIS from Derna (in eastern Libya), these ISIS fighters and activists of the Islamic Youth Shura Council moved towards Sirte. A few ISIS fighters remain in Sirte’s al-Ghiza Bahariya neighborhood. No-one knows how many civilians are held hostage in that area.

Since August, the United States has bombed Sirte 490 times. This was aerial bombardment to assist the Misrata militia. As these aerial attacks and ground forces moved in, ISIS fighters slipped away from the city. This has been the modus operandi of ISIS – not to remain and fight against the odds, but to shift the focus of operations elsewhere. ISIS fighters went back to Benghazi, where the unending battle in that city has now picked up with the increase of these gunmen. They have also fled south, deep into the Libyan Desert to the town of Sabha – the town that links Libya to Algeria, Niger and Mali. It is through the town of Sabha that ISIS and Boko Haram fighters moved back and forth between northern Nigeria and Sirte, and where al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb has one of its bases. Sabha is a smuggler’s paradise – where human traffickers and arms dealers gather alongside extremists. It is a town ruined, since 2011, into the dangerous trades, a town that is a parking lot for well-used Toyota Hilux trucks. The ISIS fighters have also moved to Sabratha on the coast and to Bani Walid in the west, as well as into the slumlands of Tripoli. What will come out of this dispersion is hard to say. What is important to recognize is that ISIS has not been vanquished with the fall of Sirte.

In fact, the battle for Sirte has already opened up the surface wounds on Libya’s society. The NATO war of 2011 delivered Libya not to one government with a monopoly over violence, but to a chessboard of competing militia groups who have allegiance to regional powers. Politics is merely from the gun. These militia groups were either rooted in their cities, in their tribes or in an extremist world-view. One of the most powerful militia armies was from the city of Misrata. It is the one that has led the fight to remove ISIS from Sirte. As this group made gains in Sirte, it found that other militia groups began to made strides against its presence in Libya’s capital, Tripoli. Last weekend, dangerous gunfights took hold of the city. Sections of the Misrata militia had backed the former Prime Minister Khalifa al-Ghwell, who had attempted a coup this October, as I reported. That coup failed. But the underlying tensions that provoked it remain. Fierce gun battles between the forces of Abdul Ghani al-Kikli (who is known as Ghneiwa) and those of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group and Misratan forces wracked the Abu Salim neighborhood. I heard from people who live nearby that it felt like a full-scale invasion – reminding them of the sounds of 2011. It is hard to piece together who is fighting whom, and to understand the objectives of the battle. On its Facebook page, the Tripoli Revolutionary Brigades of Haithem Tajouri apologized for the battle, suggesting that it did not want this inevitable conflict. Libyan officials would not say that the fracas in Tripoli is linked to the operation in Sirte.

Along the coastal highway, near the oil installation, more battles are ongoing. The Petroleum Guards of Ibrahim Jadran are once more in open conflict with the military forces of General Khalifa Hafter over the oil installations in Ben Jawad and Nawfaliya. Battles at the oil terminal in Sidra are ongoing. Miftah Magariaf of the Guards says that some extremist groups, perhaps retreating ISIS fighters, have launched rocket attacks on the oil facilities. Expectations that Libya would double its oil output – as mentioned in the recently concluded OPEC meeting – should now be taken with a grain of salt. It was General Hafter’s control of the ports that allowed the Libyan National Oil Chairman Mustafa Sanalla to make this claim. But now with the fight over the oil installations back, it is unlikely that any easy compromise could be found. Jadran’s brother remains an ISIS member. There has long been a fear that Jadran might deliver his Petroleum Guards to the extremists.

The United Nations’ Martin Kobler quite rightly said, ‘It is completely unacceptable for armed groups to fight to assert their interest and control, particularly in residential areas, terrorizing the population.’ Of course, this statement was not made in 2011, when the NATO countries egged on these very armed groups to do exactly that – fight in residential areas and terrorize the population. Many of the most extreme militia groups – those who pledged allegiance to al-Qaeda and to ISIS – had received arms from Qatar and the United States. Ambassador Chris Stevens, who was later killed in Benghazi, was the US liaison with the Libyan rebels, including these extremist groups. Arms dealers such as Marc Turi provided a ‘zero footprint’ for the United States, so that these extremists could get weapons but not directly from the US government. In Benghazi, there were reports that the CIA directly provided arms to various groups, including extremists. It is these very people now who are emboldened in Libya, and continue to wreck that country.

During the Republican primary, Senator Ted Cruz said he’d like to ‘carpet-bomb ISIS into oblivion, testing if sand can glow in the dark.’ The sands of North Africa are already glowing in the dark. Its people shudder for the future.

Two major Arab cities fell on Tuesday – Aleppo (Syria) to the Syrian Arab Army and Sirte (Libya) to the militia armies of Misrata. One of the common features of these battles is the sheer destruction of the cities. Sirte, which was under siege since May, is rubble. Its infrastructure – including hospitals and mosques – is gone. Aleppo’s main bazaar and many of its residential areas have simply been erased. These cities resemble Fallujah (Iraq) after the United States twice razed large parts of it the ground. There is much here that resembles Kobané (Syria) after ISIS had been chased out of this city by US airstrikes and Kurdish militia ground operations. Great cities reduced to ruin. It is as if the Mongol Horde or the Crusades had returned. ‘All cities must be razed,’ said Genghis Khan. His commandment echoes from North Africa to West Asia.

The Syrian Arab Army, as I noted last week, will consolidate its hold on Aleppo before making a gradual pivot eastwards toward Raqqa. It is clear that the government in Damascus wants to move towards that ISIS stronghold before the Iraqis, backed by the West, take Mosul (Iraq). The Syrian government fears – as I am told – that the West, perhaps with Turkish military forces, will turn their attention to Raqqa after Mosul. If the West and the Turks move on Raqqa, it would mean the formal dismemberment of Syria, something that the Damascus government opposes. If there is Turkish military involvement, it would mean the end of any Kurdish ambitions to maintain the Rojava enclave of Kurdistan. The race for Raqqa will come within the year. Mosul – a city with a million people – will take time to conquer. Portents of great devastation are already apparent. For every news story on atrocities in Aleppo, there is one that is not written on what is happening in the march into Mosul.

Meanwhile, celebrations in Libya over the defeat of ISIS in Sirte are premature. ISIS took that city – Muammar Qaddafi’s hometown – in early 2015. Many of the ISIS fighters had fled Syria, where they had gone from Northern Africa to join the Caliphate. The moment the United States began to bomb ISIS targets in Syria, many foreign fighters returned home. They brought with them their commitment to their cause. Some went back to Europe, where a few conducted terror attacks. Others returned to Tunisia and to Libya, where they both conducted terror attacks and helped ISIS seize tracts of territory in both countries. It was these returnees, joining with fraternal extremists from Derna and Benghazi, who marched into Sirte in 2015. Defeats are never merely defeats. When the al-Qaeda’s Mujahideen Shura Council expelled ISIS from Derna (in eastern Libya), these ISIS fighters and activists of the Islamic Youth Shura Council moved towards Sirte. A few ISIS fighters remain in Sirte’s al-Ghiza Bahariya neighborhood. No-one knows how many civilians are held hostage in that area.

Since August, the United States has bombed Sirte 490 times. This was aerial bombardment to assist the Misrata militia. As these aerial attacks and ground forces moved in, ISIS fighters slipped away from the city. This has been the modus operandi of ISIS – not to remain and fight against the odds, but to shift the focus of operations elsewhere. ISIS fighters went back to Benghazi, where the unending battle in that city has now picked up with the increase of these gunmen. They have also fled south, deep into the Libyan Desert to the town of Sabha – the town that links Libya to Algeria, Niger and Mali. It is through the town of Sabha that ISIS and Boko Haram fighters moved back and forth between northern Nigeria and Sirte, and where al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb has one of its bases. Sabha is a smuggler’s paradise – where human traffickers and arms dealers gather alongside extremists. It is a town ruined, since 2011, into the dangerous trades, a town that is a parking lot for well-used Toyota Hilux trucks. The ISIS fighters have also moved to Sabratha on the coast and to Bani Walid in the west, as well as into the slumlands of Tripoli. What will come out of this dispersion is hard to say. What is important to recognize is that ISIS has not been vanquished with the fall of Sirte.

In fact, the battle for Sirte has already opened up the surface wounds on Libya’s society. The NATO war of 2011 delivered Libya not to one government with a monopoly over violence, but to a chessboard of competing militia groups who have allegiance to regional powers. Politics is merely from the gun. These militia groups were either rooted in their cities, in their tribes or in an extremist world-view. One of the most powerful militia armies was from the city of Misrata. It is the one that has led the fight to remove ISIS from Sirte. As this group made gains in Sirte, it found that other militia groups began to made strides against its presence in Libya’s capital, Tripoli. Last weekend, dangerous gunfights took hold of the city. Sections of the Misrata militia had backed the former Prime Minister Khalifa al-Ghwell, who had attempted a coup this October, as I reported. That coup failed. But the underlying tensions that provoked it remain. Fierce gun battles between the forces of Abdul Ghani al-Kikli (who is known as Ghneiwa) and those of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group and Misratan forces wracked the Abu Salim neighborhood. I heard from people who live nearby that it felt like a full-scale invasion – reminding them of the sounds of 2011. It is hard to piece together who is fighting whom, and to understand the objectives of the battle. On its Facebook page, the Tripoli Revolutionary Brigades of Haithem Tajouri apologized for the battle, suggesting that it did not want this inevitable conflict. Libyan officials would not say that the fracas in Tripoli is linked to the operation in Sirte.

Along the coastal highway, near the oil installation, more battles are ongoing. The Petroleum Guards of Ibrahim Jadran are once more in open conflict with the military forces of General Khalifa Hafter over the oil installations in Ben Jawad and Nawfaliya. Battles at the oil terminal in Sidra are ongoing. Miftah Magariaf of the Guards says that some extremist groups, perhaps retreating ISIS fighters, have launched rocket attacks on the oil facilities. Expectations that Libya would double its oil output – as mentioned in the recently concluded OPEC meeting – should now be taken with a grain of salt. It was General Hafter’s control of the ports that allowed the Libyan National Oil Chairman Mustafa Sanalla to make this claim. But now with the fight over the oil installations back, it is unlikely that any easy compromise could be found. Jadran’s brother remains an ISIS member. There has long been a fear that Jadran might deliver his Petroleum Guards to the extremists.

The United Nations’ Martin Kobler quite rightly said, ‘It is completely unacceptable for armed groups to fight to assert their interest and control, particularly in residential areas, terrorizing the population.’ Of course, this statement was not made in 2011, when the NATO countries egged on these very armed groups to do exactly that – fight in residential areas and terrorize the population. Many of the most extreme militia groups – those who pledged allegiance to al-Qaeda and to ISIS – had received arms from Qatar and the United States. Ambassador Chris Stevens, who was later killed in Benghazi, was the US liaison with the Libyan rebels, including these extremist groups. Arms dealers such as Marc Turi provided a ‘zero footprint’ for the United States, so that these extremists could get weapons but not directly from the US government. In Benghazi, there were reports that the CIA directly provided arms to various groups, including extremists. It is these very people now who are emboldened in Libya, and continue to wreck that country.

During the Republican primary, Senator Ted Cruz said he’d like to ‘carpet-bomb ISIS into oblivion, testing if sand can glow in the dark.’ The sands of North Africa are already glowing in the dark. Its people shudder for the future.

Last month, the Washington Post gave a glowing front-page boost to an anonymous online blacklist of hundreds of American websites, from marginal conspiracy sites to flagship libertarian and progressive publications. As Max Blumenthal reported for AlterNet, the anonymous website argued that all of them should be investigated by the federal government and potentially prosecuted under the Espionage Act as Russian spies, for wittingly or unwittingly spreading Russian propaganda.

My own satirical newspaper was raided and closed down by the Kremlin in 2008, on charges of “extremism”—akin to terrorism—which I took seriously enough to leave for home for good. What the Washington Post did in boosting an anonymous blacklist of American journalists accused of criminal treason is one of the sleaziest, and most disturbing (in a very familiar Kremlin way) things I’ve seen in this country since I fled for home. The WaPo is essentially an arm of the American deep state; its owner, Jeff Bezos, is one of the three richest Americans, worth $67 billion, and his cash cow, Amazon, is a major contractor with the Central Intelligence Agency. In other words, this is as close to an official US government blacklist of journalists as we’ve seen—a dark ominous warning before they take the next steps.

It’s now been a few days, and the shock and disgust is turning to questions about how to fight back—and who we should be fighting against. Who were the Washington Post’s sources for their journalism blacklist?

Smearing a progressive journalism icon

The WaPo smear was authored by tech reporter Craig Timberg, a former national security editor who displayed embarrassing deference to the head of the world’s largest private surveillance operation, billionaire Eric Schmidt—in contrast to his treatment of his journalism colleagues. There’s little in Timberg’s history to suggest he’d lead one of the ugliest public smears of his colleagues in decades. Timberg’s father, a successful mainstream journalist who recently died, wrote hagiographies on his Naval Academy comrades including John McCain, the Senate’s leading Russophobic hawk, and three Iran-Contra conspirators—Oliver North, John Poindexter, and Robert McFarlane, whose crimes Timberg blames on their love of country and sacrifices in Vietnam.

WaPo’s key source was an anonymous online group calling itself PropOrNot (i.e., “Propaganda Or Not”). It was here that the blacklist of American journalists allegedly working with the Kremlin was posted. The Washington Post cited PropOrNot as a credible source, and granted them the right to anonymously accuse major American news outlets of treason, recommending that the government investigate and prosecute them under the Espionage Act for spreading Russian propaganda.

Featured alongside those anonymously accused of treason by PropOrNot, among a long list of marginal conspiracy sites and major news hubs, is Truthdig. This news and opinion site was co-founded by Zuade Kaufman and the veteran journalist Robert Scheer, who is a professor of USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and former columnist for the LA Times. It would not be the first time Scheer has come under attack from dark forces. In the mid-late 1960s, Scheer made his fame as editor and reporter for Ramparts, the fearless investigative magazine that changed American journalism. One of the biggest bombshell stories that Scheer’s magazine exposed was the CIA’s covert funding of the National Student Association, then America’s largest college student organization, which had chapters on 400 campuses and a major presence internationally.

The CIA was not pleased with Scheer’s magazine’s work, and shortly afterwards launched a top-secret and illegal domestic spying campaign against Scheer and Ramparts, believing that they must be a Russian Communist front. A secret team of CIA operatives—kept secret even from the rest of Langley, the operation was so blatantly illegal—spied on Scheer and his Ramparts colleagues, dug through Ramparts’ funders lives and harassed some of them into ditching the magazine, but in all of that they couldn’t find a single piece of evidence linking Scheer’s magazine to Kremlin agents. This secret illegal CIA investigation into Scheer’s magazine expanded its domestic spying project, code-named MH-CHAOS, that grew into a monster targeting hundreds of thousands of Americans, only to be exposed by Seymour Hersh in late 1974, leading to the creation of the Church Committee hearings and calls by Congress for the abolition of the Central Intelligence Agency.

It’s one of the dark ugly ironies that 50 years later, Scheer has been anonymously accused of working for Russian spies, only this time the accusers have the full cooperation of the Washington Post’s front page.

PropOrNot’s Ukrainian fascist salute

Still the question lingers: Who is behind PropOrNot? Who are they? We may have to await the defamation lawsuits that are almost certainly coming from those smeared by the Post and by PropOrNot. Their description sounds like the “About” tab on any number of Washington front groups that journalists and researchers are used to coming across:

“PropOrNot is an independent team of concerned American citizens with a wide range of backgrounds and expertise, including professional experience in computer science, statistics, public policy, and national security affairs.”

The only specific clues given were an admission that at least one of its members with access to its Twitter handle is “Ukrainian-American”. They had given this away in a handful of early Ukrainian-language tweets, parroting Ukrainian ultranationalist slogans, before the group was known.

One PropOrNot tweet, dated November 17, invokes a 1940s Ukrainian fascist salute “Heroiam Slava!!” to cheer a news item on Ukrainian hackers fighting Russians. The phrase means “Glory to the heroes” and it was formally introduced by the fascist Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) at their March-April 1941 congress in Nazi occupied Cracow, as they prepared to serve as Nazi auxiliaries in Operation Barbarossa. As historian Grzgorz Rossoliński-Liebe, author of the definitive biography on Ukraine’s wartime fascist leader and Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, explained:

“the OUN-B introduced another Ukrainian fascist salute at the Second Great Congress of the Ukrainian Nationalists in Cracow in March and April 1941. This was the most popular Ukrainian fascist salute and had to be performed according to the instructions of the OUN-B leadership by raising the right arm ‘slightly to the right, slightly above the peak of the head’ while calling ‘Glory to Ukraine!’ (Slava Ukraїni!) and responding ‘Glory to the Heroes!’ (Heroiam Slava!).”

Two months after formalizing this salute, Nazi forces allowed Bandera’s Ukrainian fascists to briefly take control of Lvov, at the time a predominantly Jewish and Polish city—whereupon the Ukrainian “patriots” murdered, tortured and raped thousands of Jews, in one of the most barbaric and bloodiest pogroms ever.

Since coming to power in the 2014 Maidan Revolution, Ukraine’s US-backed regime has waged an increasingly surreal war on journalists who don’t toe the Ukrainian ultranationalist line, and against treacherous Kremlin propagandists, real and imagined. Two years ago, Ukraine established a “Ministry of Truth”. This year the war has gone from surreal paranoia to an increasingly deadly kind of “terror.”

One of the more frightening policies enacted by the current oligarch-nationalist regime in Kiev is an online blacklist of journalists accused of collaborating with pro-Russian “terrorists.” The website, “Myrotvorets” or “Peacemaker”—was set up by Ukrainian hackers working with state intelligence and police, all of which tend to share the same ultranationalist ideologies as Parubiy and the newly-appointed neo-Nazi chief of the National Police.

Condemned by the Committee to Protect Journalists and numerous news organizations in the West and in Ukraine, the online blacklist includes the names and personal private information on some 4,500 journalists, including several western journalists and Ukrainians working for western media. The website is designed to frighten and muzzle journalists from reporting anything but the pro-nationalist party line, and it has the backing of government officials, spies and police—including the SBU (Ukraine’s successor to the KGB), the powerful Interior Minister Avakov and his notorious far-right deputy, Anton Geraschenko.

Ukraine’s journalist blacklist website—operated by Ukrainian hackers working with state intelligence—led to a rash of death threats against the doxxed journalists, whose email addresses, phone numbers and other private information was posted anonymously to the website. Many of these threats came with the wartime Ukrainian fascist salute: “Slava Ukraini!” [Glory to Ukraine!] So when PropOrNot’s anonymous “researchers” reveal only their Ukrainian(s) identity, it’s hard not to think about the spy-linked hackers who posted the deadly “Myrotvorets” blacklist of “treasonous” journalists.

The DNC’s Ukrainian ultra-nationalist researcher cries treason

Because the PropOrNot blacklist of American journalist “traitors” is anonymous, and the Washington Post front-page article protects their anonymity, we can only speculate on their identity with what little information they’ve given us. And that little bit of information reveals only a Ukrainian ultranationalist thread—the salute, the same obsessively violent paranoia towards Russia, and towards journalists, who in the eyes of Ukrainian nationalists have always been dupes and stooges, if not outright collaborators, of Russian evil.

One of the key media sources who blamed the DNC hacks on Russia, ramping up fears of crypto-Putinist infiltration, is a Ukrainian-American lobbyist working for the DNC. She is Alexandra Chalupa—described as the head of the Democratic National Committee’s opposition research on Russia and on Trump, and founder and president of the Ukrainian lobby group “US United With Ukraine Coalition”, which lobbied hard to pass a 2014 bill increasing loans and military aid to Ukraine, imposing sanctions on Russians, and tightly aligning US and Ukraine geostrategic interests.

In October of this year, Yahoo News named Chalupa one of “16 People Who Shaped the 2016 Election” for her role in pinning the DNC leaks on Russian hackers, and for making the case that the Trump campaign was under Kremlin control. “As a Democratic Party consultant and proud Ukrainian-American, Alexandra Chalupa was outraged last spring when Donald Trump named Paul Manafort as his campaign manager,” the Yahoo profile began. “As she saw it, Manafort was a key figure in advancing Russian President Vladimir Putin’s agenda inside her ancestral homeland — and she was determined to expose it.”

Chalupa worked with veteran reporter Michael Isikoff of Yahoo News to publicize her opposition research on Trump, Russia and Paul Manafort, as well as her many Ukrainian sources. In one leaked DNC email earlier this year, Chalupa boasts to DNC Communications Director Luis Miranda that she brought Isikoff to a US-government sponsored Washington event featuring 68 Ukrainian journalists, where Chalupa was invited “to speak specifically about Paul Manafort.” In turn, Isikoff named her as the key inside source “proving” that the Russians were behind the hacks, and that Trump’s campaign was under the spell of Kremlin spies and sorcerers.

(In 2008, when I broke the story about the Manafort-Kremlin ties in The Nation with Ari Berman, I did not go on to to accuse him or John McCain, whose campaign was being run by Manafort’s partner, of being Manchurian Candidates under the spell of Vladimir Putin. Because they weren’t; instead, they were sleazy, corrupt, hypocritical politicians who followed money and power rather than principle. A media hack feeding frenzy turned Manafort from what he was—a sleazy scumbag—into a fantastical Kremlin mole, forcing Manafort to resign from the Trump campaign, thanks in part to kompromat material leaked by the Ukrainian SBU, successor to the KGB.)

Meanwhile, Chalupa’s Twitter feed went wild accusing Trump of treason—a crime that carries the death penalty. Along with well over 100 tweets hashtagged #TreasonousTrump Chalupa repeatedly asked powerful government officials and bodies like the Department of Justice to investigate Trump for the capital crime of treason. In the weeks since the election, Chalupa has repeatedly accused both the Trump campaign and Russia of rigging the elections, demanding further investigations. According to The Guardian, Chalupa recently sent a report to Congress proving Russian hacked into the vote count, hoping to initiate a Congressional investigation. In an interview with Gothamist, Chalupa described alleged Russian interference in the election result as “an act of war.”

To be clear, I am not arguing that Chalupa is behind PropOrNot. But it is important to provide context to the boasts by PropOrNot about its Ukrainian nationalist links—within the larger context of the Clinton campaign’s anti-Kremlin hysteria, which crossed the line into Cold War xenophobia time and time again, an anti-Russian xenophobia shared by Clinton’s Ukrainian nationalist allies. To me, it looks like a classic case of blowback: A hyper-nationalist group whose extremism happens to be useful to American geopolitical ambitions, and is therefore nurtured to create problems for our competitor. Indeed, the US has cultivated extreme Ukrainian nationalists as proxies for decades, since the Cold War began.

As investigative journalist Russ Bellant documented in his classic exposé, “Old Nazis, New Right,” Ukrainian Nazi collaborators were brought into the United States and weaponized for use against Russia during the Cold War, despite whatever role they may have played in the Holocaust and in the mass slaughter of Ukraine’s ethnic Poles. After spending so many years encouraging extreme Ukrainian nationalism, it’s no surprise that the whole policy is beginning to blow back.

WaPo’s other source: A loony, far-right eugenicist think tank

Besides PropOrNot, the Washington Post’s Craig Timberg relied on only one other source to demonstrate the influence of Russian propaganda: the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI), whose “fellow” Clint Watts is cited by name, along with a report he co-authored, “Trolling for Trump: How Russia is Trying to Destroy Our Democracy.”

Somehow, in the pushback and outrage over the WaPo blacklist story, the FPRI has managed to fly under the radar. So much so that when Fortune’s Matthew Ingram correctly described the FPRI as “proponents of the Cold War” he was compelled to issue a clarification, changing the description to “a conservative think tank known for its hawkish stance on relations between the US and Russia.”

In fact, historically the Foreign Policy Research Institute has been one of the looniest (and spookiest) extreme-right think tanks since the early Cold War days, promoting “winnable” nuclear war, maximum confrontation with Russia, and attacking anti-colonialism as dangerously unworkable. One of the key brains behind the FPRI’s extreme-right Cold War views also happened to be a former Austrian fascist official who, upon emigrating to America, became one of this country’s leading proponents of racial eugenics and white supremacy.

The Foreign Policy Research Institute was founded by Robert Strausz-Hupé and set up on the University of Pennsylvania campus, with backing from the Vick’s chemical company, funder of numerous reactionary rightwing causes since the New Deal began. And, as the New York Times reported, the FPRI also was covertly funded by the CIA, a revelation that would lead to student protests and the FPRI removing itself from Penn’s campus in 1970.

The FPRI’s founder, Strausz-Hupe, emigrated to the US from Austria in the 1920s. In the early Cold War years, he became known as an advocate of aggressive confrontation with the Soviet Union, openly advocating total nuclear war rather than anything like surrender or cohabitation. In a 1961 treatise “A Forward Strategy for America” that Strausz-Hupe co-authored with his frequent FPRI collaborator, the former Austrian fascist official and racial eugenics advocate Stefan Possony, they wrote:

“Even at a moment when the United States faces defeat because, for example, Europe, Asia and Africa have fallen to communist domination, a sudden nuclear attack against the Soviet Union could at least avenge the disaster and deprive the opponent of the ultimate triumph. While such a reversal at the last moment almost certainly would result in severe American casualties, it might still nullify all previous Soviet conquests.”

But it was Russian propaganda that most concerned Strausz-Hupe and his FPRI. In 1959, for example, he published a three-page spread in the New York Times, headlined “Why Russia Is Ahead in Propaganda,” that has odd echoes of last month’s paranoid Washington Post article alleging a vast conspiracy of American journalists secretly poisoning the public’s mind with Russian propaganda. The article argued, as many do today, that America and the West were dangerously behind the Russians in the propaganda arms race—and dangerously disadvantaged by our open and free society, where propaganda is allegedly sniffed out by our ever-vigilant and fearless media.

The only way for America to protect itself from Russian propaganda, he wrote, was to massively increase its propaganda warfare budgets, and close the alleged “propaganda gap”—echoing again the same solutions being peddled today in Washington and London:

“[W]ithin the limitations of our society, we can take steps to expand and improve our existing programs.

“These programs have been far from generous. It has been estimated, for example, that the Communists in one single propaganda offensive—the germ-warfare campaign during the Korean conflict—spent nearly as much as the entire annual allocation to the United States Information Agency. We should increase the austere budget of the U.S.I.A. We should give our information specialists a greater voice in policy-making councils. We should attempt to coordinate more fully and effectively the propaganda programs of the Western alliance.”

A few years later, the FPRI’s Strausz-Hupe published a deranged attack in the New York Times against Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr. Strangelove, calling it “the most vicious attack to date launched by way of our mass media against the American military profession”. The FPRI’s founding director went further, accusing Kubrick of being, if not a conscious Russian agent of propaganda, then a Soviet dupe undermining American democracy and stability—the same sort of paranoid accusations that FPRI is leveling again today. As Strausz-Hupe wrote:

“Anyone who cares to scan the Soviet press and the Communist press in other lands will note that it is one of the principal Communist objectives to drive a wedge between the American people and their military leaders. Mr. Kubrick’s creation certainly serves this purpose.”

Reading that then, knowing how the Soviet Union eventually collapsed on itself without firing a shot—and seeing the same paranoid, sleazy lies being peddled again today, one is dumbstruck by just how stagnant our intellectual culture is. We’ve never thawed ourselves out from our Cold War pathologies; we’re still trapped in the same structures that nurture these pathologies. Too many careers and salaries depend on it...

But Strausz-Hupe was the voice of reason compared to his chief collaborator and co-author at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, Stefan Possony. He too was an Austrian emigre, although Possony didn’t leave his homeland until 1938. Before then he served in the Austrofascist governments of both Dollfuss and Schuschnigg, but left after the Nazi Anschluss deposed the native fascists and installed Hitler’s puppets in their place.

Possony was a director and fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, and according to historian Robert Vitalis’ recent book “White World Power” [Cornell University Press], Possony co-authored nearly all of the FPRI’s policy research material until he moved to Stanford’s Hoover Institute in 1961, where he helped align the two institutions. Possony continued publishing in the FPRI’s journal Orbis throughout the 1960s and beyond. He was also throughout this time one of the most prolific contributors to Mankind Quarterly, the leading race eugenics journal in the days before The Bell Curve—and co-author race eugenics books with white supremacist Nathaniel Weyl.

So even as he was publishing aggressive Cold War propaganda for the Foreign Policy Research Institute, Possony wrote elsewhere that the “average African Negro functions as does the European after a leucotomy [prefrontal lobotomy] operation” In other articles, Possony described the people of “the Middle East, Latin America and Southeast Asia” as “genetically unpromising“ because they “lack the innate brain power required for mastery and operation of the tools of modern civilization[.] . . .” For this reason he and Strausz-Hupe opposed the early Cold War policy of de-colonization: “The accretion of lethal power in the hands of nation states dominated by populations incapable of rational thought could be a harbinger of total disaster.” Instead, they argued that white colonialism benefited the natives and raised them up; western critics of colonialism, they argued, were merely “fashionable” dupes who would be responsible for a “genocide” of local whites.

As late as a 1974 article in Mankind Quarterly, Possony was defending race eugenics loon William Shockley’s theories on the inferiority of dark skinned races, which he argued could prove that spending money on welfare was in fact a “waste” since there was no way to improve genetically inferior races. Around the same time, Possony emerged as the earliest and most effective advocate of the “Star Wars” anti-ballistic missile system adopted by President Reagan. The way Possony saw it, the Star Wars weapon was entirely offensive, and would give the United States sufficient first strike capability to win a nuclear war with Russia.

It was this history, and a 1967 New York Times exposé on how the Foreign Policy Research Institute had been covertly funded by the CIA, that led US Senator Fulbright in 1969 to reject Nixon’s nomination of Strausz-Hupe as ambassador to Morocco. Fulbright denounced Strausz-Hupe as a Cold War extremist and a threat to world peace: ''the very epitome of a hard-line, no compromise.” However, he gave in a couple of years later when Nixon named him to the post of ambassador in Sri Lanka.

This is the world the Washington Post is bringing back to its front pages. And the timing is incredible—as if Bezos’ rag has taken upon itself to soften up the American media before Trump moves in for the kill. And it’s all being done in the name of fighting “fake news” ...and fascism.

Last month, the Washington Post gave a glowing front-page boost to an anonymous online blacklist of hundreds of American websites, from marginal conspiracy sites to flagship libertarian and progressive publications. As Max Blumenthal reported for AlterNet, the anonymous website argued that all of them should be investigated by the federal government and potentially prosecuted under the Espionage Act as Russian spies, for wittingly or unwittingly spreading Russian propaganda.

My own satirical newspaper was raided and closed down by the Kremlin in 2008, on charges of “extremism”—akin to terrorism—which I took seriously enough to leave for home for good. What the Washington Post did in boosting an anonymous blacklist of American journalists accused of criminal treason is one of the sleaziest, and most disturbing (in a very familiar Kremlin way) things I’ve seen in this country since I fled for home. The WaPo is essentially an arm of the American deep state; its owner, Jeff Bezos, is one of the three richest Americans, worth $67 billion, and his cash cow, Amazon, is a major contractor with the Central Intelligence Agency. In other words, this is as close to an official US government blacklist of journalists as we’ve seen—a dark ominous warning before they take the next steps.

It’s now been a few days, and the shock and disgust is turning to questions about how to fight back—and who we should be fighting against. Who were the Washington Post’s sources for their journalism blacklist?

Smearing a progressive journalism icon

The WaPo smear was authored by tech reporter Craig Timberg, a former national security editor who displayed embarrassing deference to the head of the world’s largest private surveillance operation, billionaire Eric Schmidt—in contrast to his treatment of his journalism colleagues. There’s little in Timberg’s history to suggest he’d lead one of the ugliest public smears of his colleagues in decades. Timberg’s father, a successful mainstream journalist who recently died, wrote hagiographies on his Naval Academy comrades including John McCain, the Senate’s leading Russophobic hawk, and three Iran-Contra conspirators—Oliver North, John Poindexter, and Robert McFarlane, whose crimes Timberg blames on their love of country and sacrifices in Vietnam.

WaPo’s key source was an anonymous online group calling itself PropOrNot (i.e., “Propaganda Or Not”). It was here that the blacklist of American journalists allegedly working with the Kremlin was posted. The Washington Post cited PropOrNot as a credible source, and granted them the right to anonymously accuse major American news outlets of treason, recommending that the government investigate and prosecute them under the Espionage Act for spreading Russian propaganda.

Featured alongside those anonymously accused of treason by PropOrNot, among a long list of marginal conspiracy sites and major news hubs, is Truthdig. This news and opinion site was co-founded by Zuade Kaufman and the veteran journalist Robert Scheer, who is a professor of USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and former columnist for the LA Times. It would not be the first time Scheer has come under attack from dark forces. In the mid-late 1960s, Scheer made his fame as editor and reporter for Ramparts, the fearless investigative magazine that changed American journalism. One of the biggest bombshell stories that Scheer’s magazine exposed was the CIA’s covert funding of the National Student Association, then America’s largest college student organization, which had chapters on 400 campuses and a major presence internationally.

The CIA was not pleased with Scheer’s magazine’s work, and shortly afterwards launched a top-secret and illegal domestic spying campaign against Scheer and Ramparts, believing that they must be a Russian Communist front. A secret team of CIA operatives—kept secret even from the rest of Langley, the operation was so blatantly illegal—spied on Scheer and his Ramparts colleagues, dug through Ramparts’ funders lives and harassed some of them into ditching the magazine, but in all of that they couldn’t find a single piece of evidence linking Scheer’s magazine to Kremlin agents. This secret illegal CIA investigation into Scheer’s magazine expanded its domestic spying project, code-named MH-CHAOS, that grew into a monster targeting hundreds of thousands of Americans, only to be exposed by Seymour Hersh in late 1974, leading to the creation of the Church Committee hearings and calls by Congress for the abolition of the Central Intelligence Agency.

It’s one of the dark ugly ironies that 50 years later, Scheer has been anonymously accused of working for Russian spies, only this time the accusers have the full cooperation of the Washington Post’s front page.

PropOrNot’s Ukrainian fascist salute

Still the question lingers: Who is behind PropOrNot? Who are they? We may have to await the defamation lawsuits that are almost certainly coming from those smeared by the Post and by PropOrNot. Their description sounds like the “About” tab on any number of Washington front groups that journalists and researchers are used to coming across:

“PropOrNot is an independent team of concerned American citizens with a wide range of backgrounds and expertise, including professional experience in computer science, statistics, public policy, and national security affairs.”

The only specific clues given were an admission that at least one of its members with access to its Twitter handle is “Ukrainian-American”. They had given this away in a handful of early Ukrainian-language tweets, parroting Ukrainian ultranationalist slogans, before the group was known.

One PropOrNot tweet, dated November 17, invokes a 1940s Ukrainian fascist salute “Heroiam Slava!!” to cheer a news item on Ukrainian hackers fighting Russians. The phrase means “Glory to the heroes” and it was formally introduced by the fascist Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) at their March-April 1941 congress in Nazi occupied Cracow, as they prepared to serve as Nazi auxiliaries in Operation Barbarossa. As historian Grzgorz Rossoliński-Liebe, author of the definitive biography on Ukraine’s wartime fascist leader and Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, explained:

“the OUN-B introduced another Ukrainian fascist salute at the Second Great Congress of the Ukrainian Nationalists in Cracow in March and April 1941. This was the most popular Ukrainian fascist salute and had to be performed according to the instructions of the OUN-B leadership by raising the right arm ‘slightly to the right, slightly above the peak of the head’ while calling ‘Glory to Ukraine!’ (Slava Ukraїni!) and responding ‘Glory to the Heroes!’ (Heroiam Slava!).”

Two months after formalizing this salute, Nazi forces allowed Bandera’s Ukrainian fascists to briefly take control of Lvov, at the time a predominantly Jewish and Polish city—whereupon the Ukrainian “patriots” murdered, tortured and raped thousands of Jews, in one of the most barbaric and bloodiest pogroms ever.

Since coming to power in the 2014 Maidan Revolution, Ukraine’s US-backed regime has waged an increasingly surreal war on journalists who don’t toe the Ukrainian ultranationalist line, and against treacherous Kremlin propagandists, real and imagined. Two years ago, Ukraine established a “Ministry of Truth”. This year the war has gone from surreal paranoia to an increasingly deadly kind of “terror.”

One of the more frightening policies enacted by the current oligarch-nationalist regime in Kiev is an online blacklist of journalists accused of collaborating with pro-Russian “terrorists.” The website, “Myrotvorets” or “Peacemaker”—was set up by Ukrainian hackers working with state intelligence and police, all of which tend to share the same ultranationalist ideologies as Parubiy and the newly-appointed neo-Nazi chief of the National Police.

Condemned by the Committee to Protect Journalists and numerous news organizations in the West and in Ukraine, the online blacklist includes the names and personal private information on some 4,500 journalists, including several western journalists and Ukrainians working for western media. The website is designed to frighten and muzzle journalists from reporting anything but the pro-nationalist party line, and it has the backing of government officials, spies and police—including the SBU (Ukraine’s successor to the KGB), the powerful Interior Minister Avakov and his notorious far-right deputy, Anton Geraschenko.

Ukraine’s journalist blacklist website—operated by Ukrainian hackers working with state intelligence—led to a rash of death threats against the doxxed journalists, whose email addresses, phone numbers and other private information was posted anonymously to the website. Many of these threats came with the wartime Ukrainian fascist salute: “Slava Ukraini!” [Glory to Ukraine!] So when PropOrNot’s anonymous “researchers” reveal only their Ukrainian(s) identity, it’s hard not to think about the spy-linked hackers who posted the deadly “Myrotvorets” blacklist of “treasonous” journalists.

The DNC’s Ukrainian ultra-nationalist researcher cries treason

Because the PropOrNot blacklist of American journalist “traitors” is anonymous, and the Washington Post front-page article protects their anonymity, we can only speculate on their identity with what little information they’ve given us. And that little bit of information reveals only a Ukrainian ultranationalist thread—the salute, the same obsessively violent paranoia towards Russia, and towards journalists, who in the eyes of Ukrainian nationalists have always been dupes and stooges, if not outright collaborators, of Russian evil.

One of the key media sources who blamed the DNC hacks on Russia, ramping up fears of crypto-Putinist infiltration, is a Ukrainian-American lobbyist working for the DNC. She is Alexandra Chalupa—described as the head of the Democratic National Committee’s opposition research on Russia and on Trump, and founder and president of the Ukrainian lobby group “US United With Ukraine Coalition”, which lobbied hard to pass a 2014 bill increasing loans and military aid to Ukraine, imposing sanctions on Russians, and tightly aligning US and Ukraine geostrategic interests.

In October of this year, Yahoo News named Chalupa one of “16 People Who Shaped the 2016 Election” for her role in pinning the DNC leaks on Russian hackers, and for making the case that the Trump campaign was under Kremlin control. “As a Democratic Party consultant and proud Ukrainian-American, Alexandra Chalupa was outraged last spring when Donald Trump named Paul Manafort as his campaign manager,” the Yahoo profile began. “As she saw it, Manafort was a key figure in advancing Russian President Vladimir Putin’s agenda inside her ancestral homeland — and she was determined to expose it.”

Chalupa worked with veteran reporter Michael Isikoff of Yahoo News to publicize her opposition research on Trump, Russia and Paul Manafort, as well as her many Ukrainian sources. In one leaked DNC email earlier this year, Chalupa boasts to DNC Communications Director Luis Miranda that she brought Isikoff to a US-government sponsored Washington event featuring 68 Ukrainian journalists, where Chalupa was invited “to speak specifically about Paul Manafort.” In turn, Isikoff named her as the key inside source “proving” that the Russians were behind the hacks, and that Trump’s campaign was under the spell of Kremlin spies and sorcerers.

(In 2008, when I broke the story about the Manafort-Kremlin ties in The Nation with Ari Berman, I did not go on to to accuse him or John McCain, whose campaign was being run by Manafort’s partner, of being Manchurian Candidates under the spell of Vladimir Putin. Because they weren’t; instead, they were sleazy, corrupt, hypocritical politicians who followed money and power rather than principle. A media hack feeding frenzy turned Manafort from what he was—a sleazy scumbag—into a fantastical Kremlin mole, forcing Manafort to resign from the Trump campaign, thanks in part to kompromat material leaked by the Ukrainian SBU, successor to the KGB.)

Meanwhile, Chalupa’s Twitter feed went wild accusing Trump of treason—a crime that carries the death penalty. Along with well over 100 tweets hashtagged #TreasonousTrump Chalupa repeatedly asked powerful government officials and bodies like the Department of Justice to investigate Trump for the capital crime of treason. In the weeks since the election, Chalupa has repeatedly accused both the Trump campaign and Russia of rigging the elections, demanding further investigations. According to The Guardian, Chalupa recently sent a report to Congress proving Russian hacked into the vote count, hoping to initiate a Congressional investigation. In an interview with Gothamist, Chalupa described alleged Russian interference in the election result as “an act of war.”

To be clear, I am not arguing that Chalupa is behind PropOrNot. But it is important to provide context to the boasts by PropOrNot about its Ukrainian nationalist links—within the larger context of the Clinton campaign’s anti-Kremlin hysteria, which crossed the line into Cold War xenophobia time and time again, an anti-Russian xenophobia shared by Clinton’s Ukrainian nationalist allies. To me, it looks like a classic case of blowback: A hyper-nationalist group whose extremism happens to be useful to American geopolitical ambitions, and is therefore nurtured to create problems for our competitor. Indeed, the US has cultivated extreme Ukrainian nationalists as proxies for decades, since the Cold War began.

As investigative journalist Russ Bellant documented in his classic exposé, “Old Nazis, New Right,” Ukrainian Nazi collaborators were brought into the United States and weaponized for use against Russia during the Cold War, despite whatever role they may have played in the Holocaust and in the mass slaughter of Ukraine’s ethnic Poles. After spending so many years encouraging extreme Ukrainian nationalism, it’s no surprise that the whole policy is beginning to blow back.

WaPo’s other source: A loony, far-right eugenicist think tank

Besides PropOrNot, the Washington Post’s Craig Timberg relied on only one other source to demonstrate the influence of Russian propaganda: the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI), whose “fellow” Clint Watts is cited by name, along with a report he co-authored, “Trolling for Trump: How Russia is Trying to Destroy Our Democracy.”

Somehow, in the pushback and outrage over the WaPo blacklist story, the FPRI has managed to fly under the radar. So much so that when Fortune’s Matthew Ingram correctly described the FPRI as “proponents of the Cold War” he was compelled to issue a clarification, changing the description to “a conservative think tank known for its hawkish stance on relations between the US and Russia.”

In fact, historically the Foreign Policy Research Institute has been one of the looniest (and spookiest) extreme-right think tanks since the early Cold War days, promoting “winnable” nuclear war, maximum confrontation with Russia, and attacking anti-colonialism as dangerously unworkable. One of the key brains behind the FPRI’s extreme-right Cold War views also happened to be a former Austrian fascist official who, upon emigrating to America, became one of this country’s leading proponents of racial eugenics and white supremacy.

The Foreign Policy Research Institute was founded by Robert Strausz-Hupé and set up on the University of Pennsylvania campus, with backing from the Vick’s chemical company, funder of numerous reactionary rightwing causes since the New Deal began. And, as the New York Times reported, the FPRI also was covertly funded by the CIA, a revelation that would lead to student protests and the FPRI removing itself from Penn’s campus in 1970.

The FPRI’s founder, Strausz-Hupe, emigrated to the US from Austria in the 1920s. In the early Cold War years, he became known as an advocate of aggressive confrontation with the Soviet Union, openly advocating total nuclear war rather than anything like surrender or cohabitation. In a 1961 treatise “A Forward Strategy for America” that Strausz-Hupe co-authored with his frequent FPRI collaborator, the former Austrian fascist official and racial eugenics advocate Stefan Possony, they wrote:

“Even at a moment when the United States faces defeat because, for example, Europe, Asia and Africa have fallen to communist domination, a sudden nuclear attack against the Soviet Union could at least avenge the disaster and deprive the opponent of the ultimate triumph. While such a reversal at the last moment almost certainly would result in severe American casualties, it might still nullify all previous Soviet conquests.”

But it was Russian propaganda that most concerned Strausz-Hupe and his FPRI. In 1959, for example, he published a three-page spread in the New York Times, headlined “Why Russia Is Ahead in Propaganda,” that has odd echoes of last month’s paranoid Washington Post article alleging a vast conspiracy of American journalists secretly poisoning the public’s mind with Russian propaganda. The article argued, as many do today, that America and the West were dangerously behind the Russians in the propaganda arms race—and dangerously disadvantaged by our open and free society, where propaganda is allegedly sniffed out by our ever-vigilant and fearless media.

The only way for America to protect itself from Russian propaganda, he wrote, was to massively increase its propaganda warfare budgets, and close the alleged “propaganda gap”—echoing again the same solutions being peddled today in Washington and London:

“[W]ithin the limitations of our society, we can take steps to expand and improve our existing programs.

“These programs have been far from generous. It has been estimated, for example, that the Communists in one single propaganda offensive—the germ-warfare campaign during the Korean conflict—spent nearly as much as the entire annual allocation to the United States Information Agency. We should increase the austere budget of the U.S.I.A. We should give our information specialists a greater voice in policy-making councils. We should attempt to coordinate more fully and effectively the propaganda programs of the Western alliance.”

A few years later, the FPRI’s Strausz-Hupe published a deranged attack in the New York Times against Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr. Strangelove, calling it “the most vicious attack to date launched by way of our mass media against the American military profession”. The FPRI’s founding director went further, accusing Kubrick of being, if not a conscious Russian agent of propaganda, then a Soviet dupe undermining American democracy and stability—the same sort of paranoid accusations that FPRI is leveling again today. As Strausz-Hupe wrote:

“Anyone who cares to scan the Soviet press and the Communist press in other lands will note that it is one of the principal Communist objectives to drive a wedge between the American people and their military leaders. Mr. Kubrick’s creation certainly serves this purpose.”

Reading that then, knowing how the Soviet Union eventually collapsed on itself without firing a shot—and seeing the same paranoid, sleazy lies being peddled again today, one is dumbstruck by just how stagnant our intellectual culture is. We’ve never thawed ourselves out from our Cold War pathologies; we’re still trapped in the same structures that nurture these pathologies. Too many careers and salaries depend on it...

But Strausz-Hupe was the voice of reason compared to his chief collaborator and co-author at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, Stefan Possony. He too was an Austrian emigre, although Possony didn’t leave his homeland until 1938. Before then he served in the Austrofascist governments of both Dollfuss and Schuschnigg, but left after the Nazi Anschluss deposed the native fascists and installed Hitler’s puppets in their place.

Possony was a director and fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, and according to historian Robert Vitalis’ recent book “White World Power” [Cornell University Press], Possony co-authored nearly all of the FPRI’s policy research material until he moved to Stanford’s Hoover Institute in 1961, where he helped align the two institutions. Possony continued publishing in the FPRI’s journal Orbis throughout the 1960s and beyond. He was also throughout this time one of the most prolific contributors to Mankind Quarterly, the leading race eugenics journal in the days before The Bell Curve—and co-author race eugenics books with white supremacist Nathaniel Weyl.

So even as he was publishing aggressive Cold War propaganda for the Foreign Policy Research Institute, Possony wrote elsewhere that the “average African Negro functions as does the European after a leucotomy [prefrontal lobotomy] operation” In other articles, Possony described the people of “the Middle East, Latin America and Southeast Asia” as “genetically unpromising“ because they “lack the innate brain power required for mastery and operation of the tools of modern civilization[.] . . .” For this reason he and Strausz-Hupe opposed the early Cold War policy of de-colonization: “The accretion of lethal power in the hands of nation states dominated by populations incapable of rational thought could be a harbinger of total disaster.” Instead, they argued that white colonialism benefited the natives and raised them up; western critics of colonialism, they argued, were merely “fashionable” dupes who would be responsible for a “genocide” of local whites.

As late as a 1974 article in Mankind Quarterly, Possony was defending race eugenics loon William Shockley’s theories on the inferiority of dark skinned races, which he argued could prove that spending money on welfare was in fact a “waste” since there was no way to improve genetically inferior races. Around the same time, Possony emerged as the earliest and most effective advocate of the “Star Wars” anti-ballistic missile system adopted by President Reagan. The way Possony saw it, the Star Wars weapon was entirely offensive, and would give the United States sufficient first strike capability to win a nuclear war with Russia.

It was this history, and a 1967 New York Times exposé on how the Foreign Policy Research Institute had been covertly funded by the CIA, that led US Senator Fulbright in 1969 to reject Nixon’s nomination of Strausz-Hupe as ambassador to Morocco. Fulbright denounced Strausz-Hupe as a Cold War extremist and a threat to world peace: ''the very epitome of a hard-line, no compromise.” However, he gave in a couple of years later when Nixon named him to the post of ambassador in Sri Lanka.

This is the world the Washington Post is bringing back to its front pages. And the timing is incredible—as if Bezos’ rag has taken upon itself to soften up the American media before Trump moves in for the kill. And it’s all being done in the name of fighting “fake news” ...and fascism.

"We consider things like free speech, peace, and democracy to be American values."

In February 2011, Arab Spring protests spread from Tunisia and Egypt to Zitounia, a fictional island-nation in the Mediterranean. At least that's the plot line for "Good Morning, Zitounia!" a new off-Broadway play from comic and activist Leila Ben-Abdallah.

Ben-Abdallah takes the audience back to a time when protests raged and reporters maintained their propaganda directed by the corrupt government. Despite extreme restrictions, state-owned media did their best to cover the news; a phenomenon some American journalists seem to be emulating in an all-Trump era.

"This show is for anyone who doesn't want to read the news because it is too sad, or wants to learn more about the Middle East and North Africa, but is afraid it is too dense or boring," Ben-Abdallah explained.

"Good Morning, Zitounia" stars a bunch of puppets who trade jabs over real events in Tunisia and Egypt in 2011. Puppets play correspondents and reporters reacting to the censorship imposed on them; Ben-Abdallah plays herself.

"We consider things like free speech, peace and democracy to be American values, so in addition to being funny I hope this story of the struggle for freedom in the Arab world will serve as a reminder that these are human values, and not uniquely American," said Ben-Abdallah.

"Our political climate is so demonizing of Arabs and Muslims, so anything that can serve as a reminder of our common humanity is very relevant. I also hope the parallels between dictatorship and the current American political climate can inspire us to continue to fight to maintain these values rather than take them for granted," she added.

As part of the show's pre-production, Ben-Abdallah, who is half Tunisian, interviewed participants of the 2011 uprisings while visiting friends and family in Tunisia.

Ben-Abdallah performs improv weekly at the People's Improv Theater in New York City, which will also be hosting the performances of her new show.

"We consider things like free speech, peace, and democracy to be American values."

In February 2011, Arab Spring protests spread from Tunisia and Egypt to Zitounia, a fictional island-nation in the Mediterranean. At least that's the plot line for "Good Morning, Zitounia!" a new off-Broadway play from comic and activist Leila Ben-Abdallah.

Ben-Abdallah takes the audience back to a time when protests raged and reporters maintained their propaganda directed by the corrupt government. Despite extreme restrictions, state-owned media did their best to cover the news; a phenomenon some American journalists seem to be emulating in an all-Trump era.

"This show is for anyone who doesn't want to read the news because it is too sad, or wants to learn more about the Middle East and North Africa, but is afraid it is too dense or boring," Ben-Abdallah explained.

"Good Morning, Zitounia" stars a bunch of puppets who trade jabs over real events in Tunisia and Egypt in 2011. Puppets play correspondents and reporters reacting to the censorship imposed on them; Ben-Abdallah plays herself.

"We consider things like free speech, peace and democracy to be American values, so in addition to being funny I hope this story of the struggle for freedom in the Arab world will serve as a reminder that these are human values, and not uniquely American," said Ben-Abdallah.

"Our political climate is so demonizing of Arabs and Muslims, so anything that can serve as a reminder of our common humanity is very relevant. I also hope the parallels between dictatorship and the current American political climate can inspire us to continue to fight to maintain these values rather than take them for granted," she added.

As part of the show's pre-production, Ben-Abdallah, who is half Tunisian, interviewed participants of the 2011 uprisings while visiting friends and family in Tunisia.

Ben-Abdallah performs improv weekly at the People's Improv Theater in New York City, which will also be hosting the performances of her new show.

More than 400 American military bases encircle China with missiles, bombers, warships—and nukes.

When I first went to Hiroshima in 1967, the shadow on the steps was still there. It was an almost perfect impression of a human being at ease: legs splayed, back bent, one hand by her side as she sat waiting for a bank to open. At a quarter past 8 on the morning of August 6, 1945, her silhouette was burned into the granite. I stared at the shadow for an hour or more. When I returned many years later, it was gone: taken away, disappeared, a political embarrassment.

I have spent two years making a documentary film, The Coming War on China, in which the evidence and witnesses warn that nuclear war is no longer a shadow, but a contingency. The greatest build-up of American-led military forces since the Second World War is well under way, in the northern hemisphere, on the western borders of Russia and in Asia and the Pacific, confronting China.

The great danger this beckons is not news, nor it is buried and distorted: a drumbeat of mainstream fake news that echoes the psychopathic fear embedded in public consciousness during much of the 20th century.

Like the renewal of post-Soviet Russia, the rise of China as an economic power is declared an “existential threat” to the divine right of the United States to rule and dominate human affairs.

To counter this, in 2011 President Obama announced a “pivot to Asia,” which meant that almost two-thirds of U.S. naval forces would be transferred to Asia and the Pacific by 2020. Today, more than 400 American military bases encircle China with missiles, bombers, warships and, above all, nuclear weapons. From Australia north through the Pacific to Japan, Korea and across Eurasia to Afghanistan and India, the bases form, says one U.S. strategist, “the perfect noose.”

A study by the RAND Corporation (which has planned America’s wars since Vietnam) is titled War with China: Thinking Through the Unthinkable. Commissioned by the U.S. Army, the authors evoke the Cold War when RAND made notorious the catch cry of its chief strategist, Herman Kahn — “thinking the unthinkable.” Kahn’s book, On Thermonuclear War, elaborated a plan for a “winnable” nuclear war against the Soviet Union. Today, his apocalyptic view is shared by those holding real power in the United States: the militarists and neo-conservatives in the executive, the Pentagon, the intelligence and “national security” establishment and Congress.

The current Secretary of Defense, Ashton Carter, a verbose provocateur, says U.S. policy is to confront those “who see America’s dominance and want to take that away from us.”

For all the attempts to detect a departure in foreign policy, this is almost certainly the view of Donald Trump, whose abuse of China during the election campaign included that of “rapist” of the American economy. On December 2, in a direct provocation of China, President-elect Trump spoke to the president of Taiwan, which China considers a renegade province of the mainland. Armed with American missiles, Taiwan is an enduring flashpoint between Washington and Beijing.

“The United States,” wrote Amitai Etzioni, professor of international affairs at George Washington University, “is preparing for a war with China, a momentous decision that so far has failed to receive a thorough review from elected officials, namely the White House and Congress.” This war would begin with a “blinding attack against Chinese anti-access facilities, including land and sea-based missile launchers … satellite and anti-satellite weapons.”

The incalculable risk is that “deep inland strikes could be mistakenly perceived by the Chinese as pre-emptive attempts to take out its nuclear weapons, thus cornering them into ‘a terrible use-it-or-lose-it dilemma’ [that would] lead to nuclear war.”

In 2015, the Pentagon released its Law of War Manual. “The United States,” it says, “has not accepted a treaty rule that prohibits the use of nuclear weapons per se, and thus nuclear weapons are lawful weapons for the United States.”

In China, a strategist told me, “We are not your enemy, but if you [in the West] decide we are, we must prepare without delay.” China’s military and arsenal are small compared to America’s. However, “for the first time,” wrote Gregory Kulacki of the Union of Concerned Scientists, “China is discussing putting its nuclear missiles on high alert so that they can be launched quickly on warning of an attack … This would be a significant and dangerous change in Chinese policy … Indeed, the nuclear weapon policies of the United States are the most prominent external factor influencing Chinese advocates for raising the alert level of China’s nuclear forces.”

Professor Ted Postol was scientific adviser to the head of U.S. naval operations. An authority on nuclear weapons, he told me, “Everybody here wants to look like they’re tough. See I got to be tough … I’m not afraid of doing anything military, I’m not afraid of threatening; I’m a hairy-chested gorilla. And we have gotten into a state, the United States has gotten into a situation where there’s a lot of sabre-rattling, and it’s really being orchestrated from the top.”

I said, “This seems incredibly dangerous.”

“That’s an understatement.”

In 2015, in considerable secrecy, the U.S. staged its biggest single military exercise since the Cold War. This was Talisman Sabre; an armada of ships and long-range bombers rehearsed an “Air-Sea Battle Concept for China” – ASB — blocking sea lanes in the Straits of Malacca and cutting off China’s access to oil, gas and other raw materials from the Middle East and Africa.

It is such a provocation, and the fear of a U.S. Navy blockade, that has seen China feverishly building strategic airstrips on disputed reefs and islets in the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea. Last July, the UN Permanent Court of Arbitration ruled against China’s claim of sovereignty over these islands. Although the action was brought by the Philippines, it was presented by leading American and British lawyers and could be traced to U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. In 2010, Clinton flew to Manila. She demanded that America’s former colony reopen the U.S. military bases closed in the 1990s following a popular campaign against the violence they generated, especially against Filipino women. She declared China’s claim on the Spratly Islands—which lie more than 7,500 miles from the United States—a threat to U.S. “national security” and to “freedom of navigation.”

Handed millions of dollars in arms and military equipment, the government of President Benigno Aquino broke off bilateral talks with China and signed a secretive Enhanced Defense Co-operation Agreement with the U.S. This established five rotating U.S. bases and restored a hated colonial provision that American forces and contractors were immune from Philippine law.

The election of Rodrigo Duterte in April has unnerved Washington. Calling himself a socialist, he declared, “In our relations with the world, the Philippines will pursue an independent foreign policy” and noted that the United States had not apologized for its colonial atrocities. “I will break up with America,” he said, and promised to expel U.S. troops. But the U.S. remains in the Philippines, and joint military exercises continue.

In 2014, under the rubric of “information dominance”—the jargon for media manipulation, or fake news, on which the Pentagon spends more than $4 billion—the Obama administration launched a propaganda campaign that cast China, the world’s greatest trading nation, as a threat to “freedom of navigation.”

CNN led the way, its “national security reporter” reporting excitedly from on board a U.S. Navy surveillance flight over the Spratlys. The BBC persuaded frightened Filipino pilots to fly a single-engine Cessna over the disputed islands “to see how the Chinese would react.” None of these reporters questioned why the Chinese were building airstrips off their own coastline, or why American military forces were massing on China’s doorstep.

The designated chief propagandist is Admiral Harry Harris, the US military commander in Asia and the Pacific. “My responsibilities,” he told the New York Times, “cover Bollywood to Hollywood, from polar bears to penguins.” Never was imperial domination described as pithily.

Harris is one of a brace of Pentagon admirals and generals briefing selected, malleable journalists and broadcasters, with the aim of justifying a threat as specious as that with which George W Bush and Tony Blair justified the destruction of Iraq and much of the Middle East. In Los Angeles in September, Harris declared he was “ready to confront a revanchist Russia and an assertive China …If we have to fight tonight, I don’t want it to be a fair fight. If it’s a knife fight, I want to bring a gun. If it’s a gun fight, I want to bring in the artillery … and all our partners with their artillery.”

These “partners” include South Korea, the launch pad for the Pentagon’s Terminal High Altitude Air Defense system, known as THAAD, ostensibly aimed at North Korea. As Professor Postol points out, it targets China.

In Sydney, Australia, Harris called on China to “tear down its Great Wall in the South China Sea”. The imagery was front page news. Australia is America’s most obsequious “partner”; its political elite, military, intelligence agencies and the media are integrated into what is known as the “alliance”. Closing the Sydney Harbour Bridge for the motorcade of a visiting American government “dignitary” is not uncommon. The war criminal Dick Cheney was afforded this honour.

Although China is Australia’s biggest trader, on which much of the national economy relies, “confronting China” is the diktat from Washington. The few political dissenters in Canberra risk McCarthyite smears in the Murdoch press. “You in Australia are with us come what may,” said one of the architects of the Vietnam war, McGeorge Bundy. One of the most important U.S. bases is Pine Gap near Alice Springs. Founded by the CIA, it spies on China and all of Asia, and is a vital contributor to Washington’s murderous war by drone in the Middle East.

In October, Richard Marles, the defence spokesman of the main Australian opposition party, the Labor Party, demanded that “operational decisions” in provocative acts against China be left to military commanders in the South China Sea. In other words, a decision that could mean war with a nuclear power should not be taken by an elected leader or a parliament but by an admiral or a general.

This is the Pentagon line, a historic departure for any state calling itself a democracy. The ascendancy of the Pentagon in Washington – which Daniel Ellsberg has called a silent coup — is reflected in the record $5 trillion America has spent on aggressive wars since 9/11, according to a study by Brown University. The million dead in Iraq and the flight of 12 million refugees from at least four countries are the consequence.

The Japanese island of Okinawa has 32 military installations, from which Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Afghanistan and Iraq have been attacked by the United States. Today, the principal target is China, with whom Okinawans have close cultural and trade ties.

There are military aircraft constantly in the sky over Okinawa; they sometimes crash into homes and schools. People cannot sleep, teachers cannot teach. Wherever they go in their own country, they are fenced in and told to keep out.

A popular Okinawan anti-base movement has been growing since a 12-year-old girl was gang-raped by U.S. troops in 1995. It was one of hundreds of such crimes, many of them never prosecuted. Barely acknowledged in the wider world, the resistance has seen the election of Japan’s first anti-base governor, Takeshi Onaga, and presented an unfamiliar hurdle to the Tokyo government and the ultra-nationalist prime minister Shinzo Abe’s plans to repeal Japan’s “peace constitution.”

The resistance includes Fumiko Shimabukuro, aged 87, a survivor of the Second World War when a quarter of Okinawans died in the American invasion. Fumiko and hundreds of others took refuge in beautiful Henoko Bay, which she is now fighting to save. The U.S. wants to destroy the bay in order to extend runways for its bombers. “We have a choice,” she said, “silence or life.” As we gathered peacefully outside the U.S. base, Camp Schwab, giant Sea Stallion helicopters hovered over us for no reason other than to intimidate.

Across the East China Sea lies the Korean island of Jeju, a semi- tropical sanctuary and World Heritage Site declared “an island of world peace.” On this island of world peace has been built one of the most provocative military bases in the world, less than 400 miles from Shanghai. The fishing village of Gangjeong is dominated by a South Korean naval base purpose-built for U.S. aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines and destroyers equipped with the Aegis missile system, aimed at China.

A people’s resistance to these war preparations has been a presence on Jeju for almost a decade. Every day, often twice a day, villagers, Catholic priests and supporters from all over the world stage a religious mass that blocks the gates of the base. In a country where political demonstrations are often banned, unlike powerful religions, the tactic has produced an inspiring spectacle.

One of the leaders, Father Mun Jeong-hyeon, told me, “I sing four songs every day at the base, regardless of the weather. I sing in typhoons, no exception. To build this base, they destroyed the environment, and the life of the villagers, and we should be a witness to that. They want to rule the Pacific. They want to make China isolated in the world. They want to be emperor of the world.”

I flew from Jeju to Shanghai for the first time in more than a generation. When I was last in China, the loudest noise I remember was the tinkling of bicycle bells; Mao Zedong had recently died, and the cities seemed dark places, in which foreboding and expectation competed. Within a few years, Deng Xiopeng, the “man who changed China,” was the “paramount leader.” Nothing prepared me for the astonishing changes today.

China presents exquisite ironies, not least the house in Shanghai where Mao and his comrades secretly founded the Communist Party of China in 1921. Today it stands in the heart of a capitalist shipping district; you walk out of this communist shrine with your Little Red Book and your plastic bust of Mao into the embrace of Starbucks, Apple, Cartier, Prada. Would Mao be shocked? I doubt it. Five years before his great revolution in 1949, he sent this secret message to Washington. “China must industrialise,” he wrote, “This can only be done by free enterprise. Chinese and American interests fit together, economically and politically. America need not fear that we will not be co-operative. We cannot risk any conflict.”

Mao offered to meet Franklin Roosevelt in the White House, and his successor Harry Truman, and his successor Dwight Eisenhower. He was rebuffed, or willfully ignored. The opportunity that might have changed contemporary history, prevented wars in Asia and saved countless lives was lost because the truth of these overtures was denied in 1950s Washington “when the catatonic Cold War trance,” wrote the critic James Naremore, “held our country in its rigid grip.”

The fake mainstream news that once again presents China as a threat is of the same mentality.

The world is inexorably shifting east; but the astonishing vision of Eurasia from China is barely understood in the West. The “New Silk Road” is a ribbon of trade, ports, pipelines and high-speed trains all the way to Europe. The world’s leader in rail technology, China is negotiating with 28 countries for routes on which trains will reach up to 400 kms an hour. This opening to the world has the approval of much of humanity, and along the way is uniting China and Russia.

“I believe in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being,” said Barack Obama, evoking the fetishism of the 1930s. This modern cult of superiority is Americanism, the world’s dominant predator. Under the liberal Obama, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, nuclear warhead spending has risen higher than under any president since the end of the Cold War. A mini nuclear weapon is planned. Known as the B61 Model 12, it will mean, says General James Cartwright, former vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that “going smaller [makes its use] more thinkable.”

In September, the Atlantic Council, a mainstream U.S. geopolitical thinktank, published a report that predicted a Hobbesian world “marked by the breakdown of order, violent extremism [and] an era of perpetual war.” The new enemies were a “resurgent” Russia and an “increasingly aggressive” China. Only heroic America can save us. There is a demented quality about this war-mongering. It is as if the “American Century” — proclaimed in 1941 by the American imperialist Henry Luce, owner of Time magazine — has ended without notice and no one has had the courage to tell the emperor to take his guns and go home.

More than 400 American military bases encircle China with missiles, bombers, warships—and nukes.

When I first went to Hiroshima in 1967, the shadow on the steps was still there. It was an almost perfect impression of a human being at ease: legs splayed, back bent, one hand by her side as she sat waiting for a bank to open. At a quarter past 8 on the morning of August 6, 1945, her silhouette was burned into the granite. I stared at the shadow for an hour or more. When I returned many years later, it was gone: taken away, disappeared, a political embarrassment.

I have spent two years making a documentary film, The Coming War on China, in which the evidence and witnesses warn that nuclear war is no longer a shadow, but a contingency. The greatest build-up of American-led military forces since the Second World War is well under way, in the northern hemisphere, on the western borders of Russia and in Asia and the Pacific, confronting China.

The great danger this beckons is not news, nor it is buried and distorted: a drumbeat of mainstream fake news that echoes the psychopathic fear embedded in public consciousness during much of the 20th century.

Like the renewal of post-Soviet Russia, the rise of China as an economic power is declared an “existential threat” to the divine right of the United States to rule and dominate human affairs.

To counter this, in 2011 President Obama announced a “pivot to Asia,” which meant that almost two-thirds of U.S. naval forces would be transferred to Asia and the Pacific by 2020. Today, more than 400 American military bases encircle China with missiles, bombers, warships and, above all, nuclear weapons. From Australia north through the Pacific to Japan, Korea and across Eurasia to Afghanistan and India, the bases form, says one U.S. strategist, “the perfect noose.”

A study by the RAND Corporation (which has planned America’s wars since Vietnam) is titled War with China: Thinking Through the Unthinkable. Commissioned by the U.S. Army, the authors evoke the Cold War when RAND made notorious the catch cry of its chief strategist, Herman Kahn — “thinking the unthinkable.” Kahn’s book, On Thermonuclear War, elaborated a plan for a “winnable” nuclear war against the Soviet Union. Today, his apocalyptic view is shared by those holding real power in the United States: the militarists and neo-conservatives in the executive, the Pentagon, the intelligence and “national security” establishment and Congress.

The current Secretary of Defense, Ashton Carter, a verbose provocateur, says U.S. policy is to confront those “who see America’s dominance and want to take that away from us.”

For all the attempts to detect a departure in foreign policy, this is almost certainly the view of Donald Trump, whose abuse of China during the election campaign included that of “rapist” of the American economy. On December 2, in a direct provocation of China, President-elect Trump spoke to the president of Taiwan, which China considers a renegade province of the mainland. Armed with American missiles, Taiwan is an enduring flashpoint between Washington and Beijing.

“The United States,” wrote Amitai Etzioni, professor of international affairs at George Washington University, “is preparing for a war with China, a momentous decision that so far has failed to receive a thorough review from elected officials, namely the White House and Congress.” This war would begin with a “blinding attack against Chinese anti-access facilities, including land and sea-based missile launchers … satellite and anti-satellite weapons.”

The incalculable risk is that “deep inland strikes could be mistakenly perceived by the Chinese as pre-emptive attempts to take out its nuclear weapons, thus cornering them into ‘a terrible use-it-or-lose-it dilemma’ [that would] lead to nuclear war.”

In 2015, the Pentagon released its Law of War Manual. “The United States,” it says, “has not accepted a treaty rule that prohibits the use of nuclear weapons per se, and thus nuclear weapons are lawful weapons for the United States.”

In China, a strategist told me, “We are not your enemy, but if you [in the West] decide we are, we must prepare without delay.” China’s military and arsenal are small compared to America’s. However, “for the first time,” wrote Gregory Kulacki of the Union of Concerned Scientists, “China is discussing putting its nuclear missiles on high alert so that they can be launched quickly on warning of an attack … This would be a significant and dangerous change in Chinese policy … Indeed, the nuclear weapon policies of the United States are the most prominent external factor influencing Chinese advocates for raising the alert level of China’s nuclear forces.”

Professor Ted Postol was scientific adviser to the head of U.S. naval operations. An authority on nuclear weapons, he told me, “Everybody here wants to look like they’re tough. See I got to be tough … I’m not afraid of doing anything military, I’m not afraid of threatening; I’m a hairy-chested gorilla. And we have gotten into a state, the United States has gotten into a situation where there’s a lot of sabre-rattling, and it’s really being orchestrated from the top.”

I said, “This seems incredibly dangerous.”

“That’s an understatement.”

In 2015, in considerable secrecy, the U.S. staged its biggest single military exercise since the Cold War. This was Talisman Sabre; an armada of ships and long-range bombers rehearsed an “Air-Sea Battle Concept for China” – ASB — blocking sea lanes in the Straits of Malacca and cutting off China’s access to oil, gas and other raw materials from the Middle East and Africa.

It is such a provocation, and the fear of a U.S. Navy blockade, that has seen China feverishly building strategic airstrips on disputed reefs and islets in the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea. Last July, the UN Permanent Court of Arbitration ruled against China’s claim of sovereignty over these islands. Although the action was brought by the Philippines, it was presented by leading American and British lawyers and could be traced to U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. In 2010, Clinton flew to Manila. She demanded that America’s former colony reopen the U.S. military bases closed in the 1990s following a popular campaign against the violence they generated, especially against Filipino women. She declared China’s claim on the Spratly Islands—which lie more than 7,500 miles from the United States—a threat to U.S. “national security” and to “freedom of navigation.”

Handed millions of dollars in arms and military equipment, the government of President Benigno Aquino broke off bilateral talks with China and signed a secretive Enhanced Defense Co-operation Agreement with the U.S. This established five rotating U.S. bases and restored a hated colonial provision that American forces and contractors were immune from Philippine law.

The election of Rodrigo Duterte in April has unnerved Washington. Calling himself a socialist, he declared, “In our relations with the world, the Philippines will pursue an independent foreign policy” and noted that the United States had not apologized for its colonial atrocities. “I will break up with America,” he said, and promised to expel U.S. troops. But the U.S. remains in the Philippines, and joint military exercises continue.

In 2014, under the rubric of “information dominance”—the jargon for media manipulation, or fake news, on which the Pentagon spends more than $4 billion—the Obama administration launched a propaganda campaign that cast China, the world’s greatest trading nation, as a threat to “freedom of navigation.”

CNN led the way, its “national security reporter” reporting excitedly from on board a U.S. Navy surveillance flight over the Spratlys. The BBC persuaded frightened Filipino pilots to fly a single-engine Cessna over the disputed islands “to see how the Chinese would react.” None of these reporters questioned why the Chinese were building airstrips off their own coastline, or why American military forces were massing on China’s doorstep.

The designated chief propagandist is Admiral Harry Harris, the US military commander in Asia and the Pacific. “My responsibilities,” he told the New York Times, “cover Bollywood to Hollywood, from polar bears to penguins.” Never was imperial domination described as pithily.

Harris is one of a brace of Pentagon admirals and generals briefing selected, malleable journalists and broadcasters, with the aim of justifying a threat as specious as that with which George W Bush and Tony Blair justified the destruction of Iraq and much of the Middle East. In Los Angeles in September, Harris declared he was “ready to confront a revanchist Russia and an assertive China …If we have to fight tonight, I don’t want it to be a fair fight. If it’s a knife fight, I want to bring a gun. If it’s a gun fight, I want to bring in the artillery … and all our partners with their artillery.”

These “partners” include South Korea, the launch pad for the Pentagon’s Terminal High Altitude Air Defense system, known as THAAD, ostensibly aimed at North Korea. As Professor Postol points out, it targets China.

In Sydney, Australia, Harris called on China to “tear down its Great Wall in the South China Sea”. The imagery was front page news. Australia is America’s most obsequious “partner”; its political elite, military, intelligence agencies and the media are integrated into what is known as the “alliance”. Closing the Sydney Harbour Bridge for the motorcade of a visiting American government “dignitary” is not uncommon. The war criminal Dick Cheney was afforded this honour.

Although China is Australia’s biggest trader, on which much of the national economy relies, “confronting China” is the diktat from Washington. The few political dissenters in Canberra risk McCarthyite smears in the Murdoch press. “You in Australia are with us come what may,” said one of the architects of the Vietnam war, McGeorge Bundy. One of the most important U.S. bases is Pine Gap near Alice Springs. Founded by the CIA, it spies on China and all of Asia, and is a vital contributor to Washington’s murderous war by drone in the Middle East.

In October, Richard Marles, the defence spokesman of the main Australian opposition party, the Labor Party, demanded that “operational decisions” in provocative acts against China be left to military commanders in the South China Sea. In other words, a decision that could mean war with a nuclear power should not be taken by an elected leader or a parliament but by an admiral or a general.

This is the Pentagon line, a historic departure for any state calling itself a democracy. The ascendancy of the Pentagon in Washington – which Daniel Ellsberg has called a silent coup — is reflected in the record $5 trillion America has spent on aggressive wars since 9/11, according to a study by Brown University. The million dead in Iraq and the flight of 12 million refugees from at least four countries are the consequence.

The Japanese island of Okinawa has 32 military installations, from which Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Afghanistan and Iraq have been attacked by the United States. Today, the principal target is China, with whom Okinawans have close cultural and trade ties.

There are military aircraft constantly in the sky over Okinawa; they sometimes crash into homes and schools. People cannot sleep, teachers cannot teach. Wherever they go in their own country, they are fenced in and told to keep out.

A popular Okinawan anti-base movement has been growing since a 12-year-old girl was gang-raped by U.S. troops in 1995. It was one of hundreds of such crimes, many of them never prosecuted. Barely acknowledged in the wider world, the resistance has seen the election of Japan’s first anti-base governor, Takeshi Onaga, and presented an unfamiliar hurdle to the Tokyo government and the ultra-nationalist prime minister Shinzo Abe’s plans to repeal Japan’s “peace constitution.”

The resistance includes Fumiko Shimabukuro, aged 87, a survivor of the Second World War when a quarter of Okinawans died in the American invasion. Fumiko and hundreds of others took refuge in beautiful Henoko Bay, which she is now fighting to save. The U.S. wants to destroy the bay in order to extend runways for its bombers. “We have a choice,” she said, “silence or life.” As we gathered peacefully outside the U.S. base, Camp Schwab, giant Sea Stallion helicopters hovered over us for no reason other than to intimidate.

Across the East China Sea lies the Korean island of Jeju, a semi- tropical sanctuary and World Heritage Site declared “an island of world peace.” On this island of world peace has been built one of the most provocative military bases in the world, less than 400 miles from Shanghai. The fishing village of Gangjeong is dominated by a South Korean naval base purpose-built for U.S. aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines and destroyers equipped with the Aegis missile system, aimed at China.

A people’s resistance to these war preparations has been a presence on Jeju for almost a decade. Every day, often twice a day, villagers, Catholic priests and supporters from all over the world stage a religious mass that blocks the gates of the base. In a country where political demonstrations are often banned, unlike powerful religions, the tactic has produced an inspiring spectacle.

One of the leaders, Father Mun Jeong-hyeon, told me, “I sing four songs every day at the base, regardless of the weather. I sing in typhoons, no exception. To build this base, they destroyed the environment, and the life of the villagers, and we should be a witness to that. They want to rule the Pacific. They want to make China isolated in the world. They want to be emperor of the world.”

I flew from Jeju to Shanghai for the first time in more than a generation. When I was last in China, the loudest noise I remember was the tinkling of bicycle bells; Mao Zedong had recently died, and the cities seemed dark places, in which foreboding and expectation competed. Within a few years, Deng Xiopeng, the “man who changed China,” was the “paramount leader.” Nothing prepared me for the astonishing changes today.

China presents exquisite ironies, not least the house in Shanghai where Mao and his comrades secretly founded the Communist Party of China in 1921. Today it stands in the heart of a capitalist shipping district; you walk out of this communist shrine with your Little Red Book and your plastic bust of Mao into the embrace of Starbucks, Apple, Cartier, Prada. Would Mao be shocked? I doubt it. Five years before his great revolution in 1949, he sent this secret message to Washington. “China must industrialise,” he wrote, “This can only be done by free enterprise. Chinese and American interests fit together, economically and politically. America need not fear that we will not be co-operative. We cannot risk any conflict.”

Mao offered to meet Franklin Roosevelt in the White House, and his successor Harry Truman, and his successor Dwight Eisenhower. He was rebuffed, or willfully ignored. The opportunity that might have changed contemporary history, prevented wars in Asia and saved countless lives was lost because the truth of these overtures was denied in 1950s Washington “when the catatonic Cold War trance,” wrote the critic James Naremore, “held our country in its rigid grip.”

The fake mainstream news that once again presents China as a threat is of the same mentality.

The world is inexorably shifting east; but the astonishing vision of Eurasia from China is barely understood in the West. The “New Silk Road” is a ribbon of trade, ports, pipelines and high-speed trains all the way to Europe. The world’s leader in rail technology, China is negotiating with 28 countries for routes on which trains will reach up to 400 kms an hour. This opening to the world has the approval of much of humanity, and along the way is uniting China and Russia.

“I believe in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being,” said Barack Obama, evoking the fetishism of the 1930s. This modern cult of superiority is Americanism, the world’s dominant predator. Under the liberal Obama, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, nuclear warhead spending has risen higher than under any president since the end of the Cold War. A mini nuclear weapon is planned. Known as the B61 Model 12, it will mean, says General James Cartwright, former vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that “going smaller [makes its use] more thinkable.”

In September, the Atlantic Council, a mainstream U.S. geopolitical thinktank, published a report that predicted a Hobbesian world “marked by the breakdown of order, violent extremism [and] an era of perpetual war.” The new enemies were a “resurgent” Russia and an “increasingly aggressive” China. Only heroic America can save us. There is a demented quality about this war-mongering. It is as if the “American Century” — proclaimed in 1941 by the American imperialist Henry Luce, owner of Time magazine — has ended without notice and no one has had the courage to tell the emperor to take his guns and go home.

On Monday night, Democracy Now! celebrated its 20th anniversary at the historic Riverside Church in New York City. Among those who addressed more than 2,000 attendants was world-renowned linguistic Noam Chomsky, who spoke about the two most dangerous threats the human species faces today: the possibility of nuclear war and the accelerating destruction of human-fueled climate change.

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

Amy Goodman:We return now to MIT professor Noam Chomsky speaking at the event.

NC: The U.S. isolation at Marrakech is symptomatic of broader developments that we should think about pretty carefully. They’re of considerable significance. U.S. isolation in the world is increasing in remarkable ways. Maybe the most striking is right in this hemisphere, what used to be called "our little region over here"—Henry Stimson, secretary of war under Roosevelt, "our little region over here," where nobody bothers us. If anybody gets out of line, we punish them harshly; otherwise, they do what we say. That’s very far from true. During this century, Latin America, for the first time in 500 years, has freed itself from Western imperialism. Last century, that’s the United States. The International Monetary Fund, which is basically an agency of the U.S. Treasury, has been kicked out of the—of South America entirely. There are no U.S. military bases left. The international organizations, the—the hemispheric organizations are beginning to exclude the United States and Canada. In 2015, there was a summit coming up, and the United States might have been excluded completely from the hemisphere over the issue of Cuba. That was the crucial issue that the hemisphere—on which the hemisphere opposed U.S. policy, as does the world. That’s surely the reason why Obama made the gestures towards normalization, that were at least some step forward—and could be reversed under Trump. We don’t know.

On a much more far-reaching scale, something similar is happening in Asia. As you know, one of Obama’s major policies was the so-called pivot to Asia, which was actually a measure to confront China, transparently. One component of the pivot to Asia was the TPP, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which excluded China, tried to bring in other Asia-Pacific countries. Well, that seems to be on its way to collapse, for pretty good reasons, I think. But at the same time, there’s another international trade agreement that is expanding and growing, namely, China’s—what they call the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, which is now drawing in U.S. allies, from Peru to Australia to Japan. The U.S. will probably choose to stay out of it, just as the United States, virtually alone, has stayed away from China’s Asian Infrastructure Development Bank, a kind of counterpart to the World Bank, that the U.S. has opposed for many years, but has now been joined by practically all U.S. allies, Britain and others. That’s—at the same time, China is expanding to the West with the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the China-based Silk Roads. The whole system is an integrated system of energy resource sharing and so on. It includes Siberia, with its rich resources. It includes India and Pakistan. Iran will soon join, it appears, and probably Turkey. This will extend all the way from China to Europe. The United States has asked for observer status, and it’s been rejected, not permitted. And one of the major commitments of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the whole of the Central Asian states, is that there can be no U.S. military bases in this entire region.

Another step toward isolation may soon take place if the president-elect carries through his promise to terminate the nuclear weapons—the nuclear deal with Iran. Other countries who are parties to the deal might well continue. They might even—Europe, mainly. That means ignoring U.S. sanctions. That will extend U.S. isolation, even from Europe. And in fact Europe might move, under these circumstances, towards backing off from the confrontation with Russia. Actually, Brexit may assist with this, because Britain was the voice of the United States in NATO, the harshest voice. Now it’s out, gives Europe some opportunities. There were choices in 1990, ’91, time of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Mikhail Gorbachev had a—what he called a vision of a common European home, an integrated, cooperative system of security, commerce, interchange, no military alliances from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The U.S. insisted on a different vision—namely, Soviet Union collapses, and NATOremains and, indeed, expands, right up to the borders of Russia now, where very serious threats are evident daily.

Well, all of this, these are significant developments. They’re related to the widely discussed matter of decline of American power. There are some conventional measures which, however, are misleading in quite interesting ways. I’ll just say a word about it, because there’s no time, but it’s something to seriously think about. By conventional measures, in 1945, the United States had reached the peak of global dominance—nothing like it in history. It had perhaps 50 percent of total world’s wealth. Other industrial countries were devastated or destroyed by the war, severely damaged. The U.S. economy had gained enormously from the war, and it was in—and the U.S., in general, had a position of dominance with no historical parallel. Well, that, of course, couldn’t last. Other industrial countries reconstructed. By around 1970, the world was described as tripolar: three major economic centers—a German-based Europe, a U.S.-based North America and the Northeast Asian area, at that time Japan-based, now China had moved in as a partner, conflict then partner. By now—by that time, U.S. share in global wealth was about 25 percent. And today it’s not far below that.

Well, all of this is highly misleading, because it fails to take into account a crucial factor, which is almost never discussed, though there’s some interesting work on it. That’s the question of ownership of the world economy. If you take a look at the corporate—the multinational corporations around the world, what do they own? Well, that turns out to be a pretty interesting matter. In virtually every—this increasingly during the period of neoliberal globalization of the last generation, corporate wealth is becoming a more realistic measure of global power than national wealth. Corporate wealth, of course, is nationally based, supported by taxpayers like us, but the ownership has nothing to do with us. Corporate ownership, if you look at that, it turns out that in virtually every economic sector—manufacturing, finance, services, retail and others—U.S. corporations are well in the lead in ownership of the global economy. And overall, their ownership is close to 50 percent of the total. That’s roughly the proportion of U.S. national wealth in 1945, which tells you something about the nature of the world in which we live. Of course, that’s not for the benefit of American citizens, but of those who own and manage these private—publicly supported and private, quasi-totalitarian systems. If you look at the military dimension, of course, the U.S. is supreme. Nobody is even close. No point talking about it. But it is possible that Europe might take a more independent role. It might move towards something like Gorbachev’s vision. That might lead to a relaxation of the rising and very dangerous tensions at the Russian border, which would be a very welcome development.

Well, there’s a lot more to say about the fears and hopes and prospects. The threats and dangers are very real. There are plenty of opportunities. And as we face them, again, particularly the younger people among you, we should never overlook the fact that the threats that we now face are the most severe that have ever arisen in human history. They are literal threats to survival: nuclear war, environmental catastrophe. These are very urgent concerns. They cannot be delayed. They became more urgent on November 8th, for the reasons you know and that I mentioned. They have to be faced directly, and soon, if the human experiment is not to prove to be a disastrous failure.

AG:MIT professor Noam Chomsky, world-renowned linguist and political dissident, speaking Monday night at Riverside Church as part of a celebration marking 20 years of Democracy Now! To see the whole evening’s events, including clips of Democracy Now! over the last 20 years, go to democracynow.org. After a short break, we’ll hear from Harry Belafonte, Danny Glover and Juan González.

On Monday night, Democracy Now! celebrated its 20th anniversary at the historic Riverside Church in New York City. Among those who addressed more than 2,000 attendants was world-renowned linguistic Noam Chomsky, who spoke about the two most dangerous threats the human species faces today: the possibility of nuclear war and the accelerating destruction of human-fueled climate change.

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

Amy Goodman:We return now to MIT professor Noam Chomsky speaking at the event.

NC: The U.S. isolation at Marrakech is symptomatic of broader developments that we should think about pretty carefully. They’re of considerable significance. U.S. isolation in the world is increasing in remarkable ways. Maybe the most striking is right in this hemisphere, what used to be called "our little region over here"—Henry Stimson, secretary of war under Roosevelt, "our little region over here," where nobody bothers us. If anybody gets out of line, we punish them harshly; otherwise, they do what we say. That’s very far from true. During this century, Latin America, for the first time in 500 years, has freed itself from Western imperialism. Last century, that’s the United States. The International Monetary Fund, which is basically an agency of the U.S. Treasury, has been kicked out of the—of South America entirely. There are no U.S. military bases left. The international organizations, the—the hemispheric organizations are beginning to exclude the United States and Canada. In 2015, there was a summit coming up, and the United States might have been excluded completely from the hemisphere over the issue of Cuba. That was the crucial issue that the hemisphere—on which the hemisphere opposed U.S. policy, as does the world. That’s surely the reason why Obama made the gestures towards normalization, that were at least some step forward—and could be reversed under Trump. We don’t know.

On a much more far-reaching scale, something similar is happening in Asia. As you know, one of Obama’s major policies was the so-called pivot to Asia, which was actually a measure to confront China, transparently. One component of the pivot to Asia was the TPP, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which excluded China, tried to bring in other Asia-Pacific countries. Well, that seems to be on its way to collapse, for pretty good reasons, I think. But at the same time, there’s another international trade agreement that is expanding and growing, namely, China’s—what they call the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, which is now drawing in U.S. allies, from Peru to Australia to Japan. The U.S. will probably choose to stay out of it, just as the United States, virtually alone, has stayed away from China’s Asian Infrastructure Development Bank, a kind of counterpart to the World Bank, that the U.S. has opposed for many years, but has now been joined by practically all U.S. allies, Britain and others. That’s—at the same time, China is expanding to the West with the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the China-based Silk Roads. The whole system is an integrated system of energy resource sharing and so on. It includes Siberia, with its rich resources. It includes India and Pakistan. Iran will soon join, it appears, and probably Turkey. This will extend all the way from China to Europe. The United States has asked for observer status, and it’s been rejected, not permitted. And one of the major commitments of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the whole of the Central Asian states, is that there can be no U.S. military bases in this entire region.

Another step toward isolation may soon take place if the president-elect carries through his promise to terminate the nuclear weapons—the nuclear deal with Iran. Other countries who are parties to the deal might well continue. They might even—Europe, mainly. That means ignoring U.S. sanctions. That will extend U.S. isolation, even from Europe. And in fact Europe might move, under these circumstances, towards backing off from the confrontation with Russia. Actually, Brexit may assist with this, because Britain was the voice of the United States in NATO, the harshest voice. Now it’s out, gives Europe some opportunities. There were choices in 1990, ’91, time of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Mikhail Gorbachev had a—what he called a vision of a common European home, an integrated, cooperative system of security, commerce, interchange, no military alliances from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The U.S. insisted on a different vision—namely, Soviet Union collapses, and NATOremains and, indeed, expands, right up to the borders of Russia now, where very serious threats are evident daily.

Well, all of this, these are significant developments. They’re related to the widely discussed matter of decline of American power. There are some conventional measures which, however, are misleading in quite interesting ways. I’ll just say a word about it, because there’s no time, but it’s something to seriously think about. By conventional measures, in 1945, the United States had reached the peak of global dominance—nothing like it in history. It had perhaps 50 percent of total world’s wealth. Other industrial countries were devastated or destroyed by the war, severely damaged. The U.S. economy had gained enormously from the war, and it was in—and the U.S., in general, had a position of dominance with no historical parallel. Well, that, of course, couldn’t last. Other industrial countries reconstructed. By around 1970, the world was described as tripolar: three major economic centers—a German-based Europe, a U.S.-based North America and the Northeast Asian area, at that time Japan-based, now China had moved in as a partner, conflict then partner. By now—by that time, U.S. share in global wealth was about 25 percent. And today it’s not far below that.

Well, all of this is highly misleading, because it fails to take into account a crucial factor, which is almost never discussed, though there’s some interesting work on it. That’s the question of ownership of the world economy. If you take a look at the corporate—the multinational corporations around the world, what do they own? Well, that turns out to be a pretty interesting matter. In virtually every—this increasingly during the period of neoliberal globalization of the last generation, corporate wealth is becoming a more realistic measure of global power than national wealth. Corporate wealth, of course, is nationally based, supported by taxpayers like us, but the ownership has nothing to do with us. Corporate ownership, if you look at that, it turns out that in virtually every economic sector—manufacturing, finance, services, retail and others—U.S. corporations are well in the lead in ownership of the global economy. And overall, their ownership is close to 50 percent of the total. That’s roughly the proportion of U.S. national wealth in 1945, which tells you something about the nature of the world in which we live. Of course, that’s not for the benefit of American citizens, but of those who own and manage these private—publicly supported and private, quasi-totalitarian systems. If you look at the military dimension, of course, the U.S. is supreme. Nobody is even close. No point talking about it. But it is possible that Europe might take a more independent role. It might move towards something like Gorbachev’s vision. That might lead to a relaxation of the rising and very dangerous tensions at the Russian border, which would be a very welcome development.

Well, there’s a lot more to say about the fears and hopes and prospects. The threats and dangers are very real. There are plenty of opportunities. And as we face them, again, particularly the younger people among you, we should never overlook the fact that the threats that we now face are the most severe that have ever arisen in human history. They are literal threats to survival: nuclear war, environmental catastrophe. These are very urgent concerns. They cannot be delayed. They became more urgent on November 8th, for the reasons you know and that I mentioned. They have to be faced directly, and soon, if the human experiment is not to prove to be a disastrous failure.

AG:MIT professor Noam Chomsky, world-renowned linguist and political dissident, speaking Monday night at Riverside Church as part of a celebration marking 20 years of Democracy Now! To see the whole evening’s events, including clips of Democracy Now! over the last 20 years, go to democracynow.org. After a short break, we’ll hear from Harry Belafonte, Danny Glover and Juan González.

Heartbreak finds new lows, inspired by the president-elect's penchant for vengeful petty tweets.

Over the course of his 2016 White House bid, President-elect Donald Trump promised to deport undocumented immigrants. Trump spoke to his supporters at a Phoenix, Arizona rally earlier this year where he said he would triple the amount of ICE agents and set up a “special deportation task force.”

Since Trump won the election, some individuals have taken to social media to ask the president-elect to deport their ex partners, the Miami New Times reports. Not only are these people asking Trump to deport their former partners, some users are providing addresses, descriptions, and sometimes photos, as well.

Internet users have been posting their messages to Trump and his surrogates on Twitter and Facebook since he won the election on Nov. 8. Most of the people who posted their pleas did so by writing, “I hope Donald Trump doesn’t delete my ex who lives at this address,” before providing the information.

Others wrote more direct posts, such as, “Hey trump, Deport my ex, please.” It’s unclear whether the posts are serious or legitimate; however, posting a former partner’s information on social media — including their immigration status and address — is likely, for many, a terrifying way to seek revenge.

The various posts created an important narrative — one that depended on the race of an individual. Most of the posts suggested the individuals’ former partners were Mexican or Dominican. Another asked if their partner could be deported because “he’s white.”

In just the ten days following the 2016 election, the Southern Poverty Law Center reported 867 instances of harassment and intimidation, 32 percent of which “were motivated by anti-immigrant sentiment.”

See below for a sampling of the recent posts.

Can Donald Trump deport my ex because he's a German citizen, or nah because he's white?

Heartbreak finds new lows, inspired by the president-elect's penchant for vengeful petty tweets.

Over the course of his 2016 White House bid, President-elect Donald Trump promised to deport undocumented immigrants. Trump spoke to his supporters at a Phoenix, Arizona rally earlier this year where he said he would triple the amount of ICE agents and set up a “special deportation task force.”

Since Trump won the election, some individuals have taken to social media to ask the president-elect to deport their ex partners, the Miami New Times reports. Not only are these people asking Trump to deport their former partners, some users are providing addresses, descriptions, and sometimes photos, as well.

Internet users have been posting their messages to Trump and his surrogates on Twitter and Facebook since he won the election on Nov. 8. Most of the people who posted their pleas did so by writing, “I hope Donald Trump doesn’t delete my ex who lives at this address,” before providing the information.

Others wrote more direct posts, such as, “Hey trump, Deport my ex, please.” It’s unclear whether the posts are serious or legitimate; however, posting a former partner’s information on social media — including their immigration status and address — is likely, for many, a terrifying way to seek revenge.

The various posts created an important narrative — one that depended on the race of an individual. Most of the posts suggested the individuals’ former partners were Mexican or Dominican. Another asked if their partner could be deported because “he’s white.”

In just the ten days following the 2016 election, the Southern Poverty Law Center reported 867 instances of harassment and intimidation, 32 percent of which “were motivated by anti-immigrant sentiment.”

See below for a sampling of the recent posts.

Can Donald Trump deport my ex because he's a German citizen, or nah because he's white?

Duterte has lived up to his vow to kill thousands of drug users and sellers, and Trump is okay with it.

Donald Trump's seat-of-the-pants pre-inaugural telephone diplomacy is causing shock waves in diplomatic circles and world capitals around the globe. But the president-elect outdid himself with a Friday call to Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte. The Filipino strongman took office earlier this year with a promise to unleash mass murder on Philippine drug users and dealers, and he has lived up to that vow, leaving the streets running with the blood of more than 5,000 killed so far, either directly by his police, or in a more shadowy fashion by "vigilantes."

But in his phone call with the Filipino strongman, Donald Trump was singing a different tune. Duterte said Saturday that Trump had endorsed his bloody antidrug campaign, telling him the Philippines was doing it "the right way" and that Trump was "quite sensitive" to "our worry about drugs."

In a Philippines government summary of the call between Trump and Duterte, the Filipino president said the pair had spoken only briefly, but touched on many topics, including the antidrug campaign.

"He wishes me well, too, in my campaign, and he said that, well, we are doing it as a sovereign nation, the right way," Duterte said.

"I could sense a good rapport, an animated President-elect Trump, and he was wishing me success in my campaign against the drug problem," Duterte said. "He understood the way we are handling it, and I said that there’s nothing wrong in protecting a country. It was a bit very encouraging in the sense that I supposed that what he really wanted to say was that we would be the last to interfere in the affairs of your own country."

"I appreciate the response that I got from President-elect Trump, and I would like to wish him success," Duterte said. "He will be a good president for the United States of America."

Duterte, who rose to national political prominence as the death squad-supporting mayor of Davao City, is among the most brutal of the crop of right-populist political leaders and movements that have emerged around the globe this year, but concern about human rights or the lives of drug users don't appear to be on Trump's radar. Trump has more pressing concerns in the Philippines, like the Trump-branded residential tower going up in metropolitan Manila. Duterte has just named the Filipino businessman who is Trump's partner in the project, Jose E. B. Antonio, a special envoy to the U.S.

The Trump team has yet to comment on the call or Duterte's characterization of it.

As Buzzfeed News reported, despite U.S. statements of concern from the Obama administration about the mass drug war killings, the State Department continues to send millions of dollars in aid to the Philippines National Police. The Obama administration requested $9 million in aid for antidrug and law enforcement programs for this year. The State Department says the funds are no longer being used for antidrug training, but funds continue to go to the police.

The State Department also said police units found to be involved in extrajudicial killings would not get U.S. assistance, but Buzzfeed News found that "officers at police stations receiving support from the U.S. have played a central role in Duterte’s bloody campaign. By comparing Philippine police data with internal State Department records, it is clear that many of the stations—especially those in the capital city of Manila—are collectively responsible for hundreds of deaths."

The continued State Department funding of police linked to the drug war killings subverts the Obama administrations rhetoric of concern about Duterte's bloody crusade, but if Trump's first chat with Duterte is any indication, even rhetorical concern about human rights in the Filipino drug war is about to go out the window.

Duterte has lived up to his vow to kill thousands of drug users and sellers, and Trump is okay with it.

Donald Trump's seat-of-the-pants pre-inaugural telephone diplomacy is causing shock waves in diplomatic circles and world capitals around the globe. But the president-elect outdid himself with a Friday call to Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte. The Filipino strongman took office earlier this year with a promise to unleash mass murder on Philippine drug users and dealers, and he has lived up to that vow, leaving the streets running with the blood of more than 5,000 killed so far, either directly by his police, or in a more shadowy fashion by "vigilantes."

But in his phone call with the Filipino strongman, Donald Trump was singing a different tune. Duterte said Saturday that Trump had endorsed his bloody antidrug campaign, telling him the Philippines was doing it "the right way" and that Trump was "quite sensitive" to "our worry about drugs."

In a Philippines government summary of the call between Trump and Duterte, the Filipino president said the pair had spoken only briefly, but touched on many topics, including the antidrug campaign.

"He wishes me well, too, in my campaign, and he said that, well, we are doing it as a sovereign nation, the right way," Duterte said.

"I could sense a good rapport, an animated President-elect Trump, and he was wishing me success in my campaign against the drug problem," Duterte said. "He understood the way we are handling it, and I said that there’s nothing wrong in protecting a country. It was a bit very encouraging in the sense that I supposed that what he really wanted to say was that we would be the last to interfere in the affairs of your own country."

"I appreciate the response that I got from President-elect Trump, and I would like to wish him success," Duterte said. "He will be a good president for the United States of America."

Duterte, who rose to national political prominence as the death squad-supporting mayor of Davao City, is among the most brutal of the crop of right-populist political leaders and movements that have emerged around the globe this year, but concern about human rights or the lives of drug users don't appear to be on Trump's radar. Trump has more pressing concerns in the Philippines, like the Trump-branded residential tower going up in metropolitan Manila. Duterte has just named the Filipino businessman who is Trump's partner in the project, Jose E. B. Antonio, a special envoy to the U.S.

The Trump team has yet to comment on the call or Duterte's characterization of it.

As Buzzfeed News reported, despite U.S. statements of concern from the Obama administration about the mass drug war killings, the State Department continues to send millions of dollars in aid to the Philippines National Police. The Obama administration requested $9 million in aid for antidrug and law enforcement programs for this year. The State Department says the funds are no longer being used for antidrug training, but funds continue to go to the police.

The State Department also said police units found to be involved in extrajudicial killings would not get U.S. assistance, but Buzzfeed News found that "officers at police stations receiving support from the U.S. have played a central role in Duterte’s bloody campaign. By comparing Philippine police data with internal State Department records, it is clear that many of the stations—especially those in the capital city of Manila—are collectively responsible for hundreds of deaths."

The continued State Department funding of police linked to the drug war killings subverts the Obama administrations rhetoric of concern about Duterte's bloody crusade, but if Trump's first chat with Duterte is any indication, even rhetorical concern about human rights in the Filipino drug war is about to go out the window.

]]>
http://www.alternet.org/world/why-everything-youve-read-about-syria-and-iraq-could-be-wrongWhy Everything You’ve Read About Syria and Iraq Could Be Wronghttp://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/239108044/0/alternet_world

Journalists and public alike should regard all information about Syria and Iraq with reasoned skepticism.

The Iraqi army, backed by US-led airstrikes, is trying to capture east Mosul at the same time as the Syrian army and its Shia paramilitary allies are fighting their way into east Aleppo. An estimated 300 civilians have been killed in Aleppo by government artillery and bombing in the last fortnight, and in Mosul there are reportedly some 600 civilian dead over a month.

Despite these similarities, the reporting by the international media of these two sieges is radically different.

In Mosul, civilian loss of life is blamed on Isis, with its indiscriminate use of mortars and suicide bombers, while the Iraqi army and their air support are largely given a free pass. Isis is accused of preventing civilians from leaving the city so they can be used as human shields.

Contrast this with Western media descriptions of the inhuman savagery of President Assad’s forces indiscriminately slaughtering civilians regardless of whether they stay or try to flee. The UN chief of humanitarian affairs, Stephen O’Brien, suggested this week that the rebels in east Aleppo were stopping civilians departing – but unlike Mosul, the issue gets little coverage.

One factor making the sieges of east Aleppo and east Mosul so similar, and different, from past sieges in the Middle East, such as the Israeli siege of Beirut in 1982 or of Gaza in 2014, is that there are no independent foreign journalists present. They are not there for the very good reason that Isis imprisons and beheads foreigners while Jabhat al-Nusra, until recently the al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria, is only a shade less bloodthirsty and generally holds them for ransom.

These are the two groups that dominate the armed opposition in Syria as a whole. In Aleppo, though only about 20 per cent of the 10,000 fighters are Nusra, it is they – along with their allies in Ahrar al-Sham – who are leading the resistance.

Unsurprisingly, foreign journalists covering developments in east Aleppo and rebel-held areas of Syria overwhelmingly do so from Lebanon or Turkey. A number of intrepid correspondents who tried to do eyewitness reporting from rebel-held areas swiftly found themselves tipped into the boots of cars or otherwise incarcerated.

Experience shows that foreign reporters are quite right not to trust their lives even to the most moderate of the armed opposition inside Syria. But, strangely enough, the same media organisations continue to put their trust in the veracity of information coming out of areas under the control of these same potential kidnappers and hostage takers. They would probably defend themselves by saying they rely on non-partisan activists, but all the evidence is that these can only operate in east Aleppo under license from the al-Qaeda-type groups.

It is inevitable that an opposition movement fighting for its life in wartime will only produce, or allow to be produced by others, information that is essentially propaganda for its own side. The fault lies not with them but a media that allows itself to be spoon-fed with dubious or one-sided stories.

For instance, the film coming out of east Aleppo in recent weeks focuses almost exclusively on heartrending scenes of human tragedy such as the death or maiming of civilians. One seldom sees shots of the 10,000 fighters, whether they are wounded or alive and well.

None of this is new. The present wars in the Middle East started with the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 which was justified by the supposed threat from Saddam Hussein’s possession of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Western journalists largely went along with this thesis, happily citing evidence from the Iraqi opposition who predictably confirmed the existence of WMD.

Some of those who produced these stories later had the gall to criticise the Iraqi opposition for misleading them, as if they had any right to expect unbiased information from people who had dedicated their lives to overthrowing Saddam Hussein or, in this particular case, getting the Americans to do so for them.

Much the same self-serving media credulity was evident in Libya during the 2011 Nato-backed uprising against Muammar Gaddafi.

Atrocity stories emanating from the Libyan opposition, many of which were subsequently proved to be baseless by human rights organisations, were rapidly promoted to lead the news, however partial the source.

The Syrian war is especially difficult to report because Isis and various al-Qaeda clones made it too dangerous to report from within opposition-held areas. There is a tremendous hunger for news from just such places, so the temptation is for the media give credence to information they get second hand from people who could in practice only operate if they belong to or are in sympathy with the dominant jihadi opposition groups.

It is always a weakness of journalists that they pretend to excavate the truth when in fact they are the conduit rather than the originator of information produced by others in their own interests. Reporters learn early that people tell them things because they are promoting some cause which might be their own career or related to bureaucratic infighting or, just possibly, hatred of lies and injustice.

A word here in defence of the humble reporter in the field: usually, it is not he or she, but the home office or media herd instinct, that decides the story of the day. Those closest to the action may be dubious about some juicy tale which is heading the news, but there is not much they can do about it.

Thus, in 2002 and 2003, several New York Times journalists wrote stories casting doubt on WMD only to find them buried deep inside the newspaper which was led by articles proving that Saddam had WMD and was a threat to the world.

Journalists and public alike should regard all information about Syria and Iraq with reasoned scepticism. They should keep in mind the words of Lakhdar Brahimi, the former UN and Arab League Special Envoy to Syria. Speaking after he had resigned in frustration in 2014, he said that “everybody had their agenda and the interests of the Syrian people came second, third or not at all”.

The quote comes from The Battle for Syria: International Rivalry in the New Middle East by Christopher Phillips, which is one of the best informed and non-partisan accounts of the Syrian tragedy yet published. He judiciously weighs the evidence for rival explanations for what happened and why. He understands the degree to which the agenda and pace events in Syria were determined externally by the intervention of foreign powers pursuing their own interests.

Overall, government experts did better than journalists, who bought into simple-minded explanations of developments, convinced that Assad was always on the verge of being overthrown.

Phillips records that at a high point of the popular uprising in July 2011, when the media was assuming that Assad was finished, that the long-serving British ambassador in Damascus, Simon Collis, wrote that “Assad can still probably count on the support of 30-40 per cent of the population.”

The French ambassador Eric Chevallier was similarly cautious, only to receive a classic rebuke from his masters in Paris who said: “Your information does not interest us. Bashar al-Assad must fall and will fall.”

Journalists and public alike should regard all information about Syria and Iraq with reasoned skepticism.

The Iraqi army, backed by US-led airstrikes, is trying to capture east Mosul at the same time as the Syrian army and its Shia paramilitary allies are fighting their way into east Aleppo. An estimated 300 civilians have been killed in Aleppo by government artillery and bombing in the last fortnight, and in Mosul there are reportedly some 600 civilian dead over a month.

Despite these similarities, the reporting by the international media of these two sieges is radically different.

In Mosul, civilian loss of life is blamed on Isis, with its indiscriminate use of mortars and suicide bombers, while the Iraqi army and their air support are largely given a free pass. Isis is accused of preventing civilians from leaving the city so they can be used as human shields.

Contrast this with Western media descriptions of the inhuman savagery of President Assad’s forces indiscriminately slaughtering civilians regardless of whether they stay or try to flee. The UN chief of humanitarian affairs, Stephen O’Brien, suggested this week that the rebels in east Aleppo were stopping civilians departing – but unlike Mosul, the issue gets little coverage.

One factor making the sieges of east Aleppo and east Mosul so similar, and different, from past sieges in the Middle East, such as the Israeli siege of Beirut in 1982 or of Gaza in 2014, is that there are no independent foreign journalists present. They are not there for the very good reason that Isis imprisons and beheads foreigners while Jabhat al-Nusra, until recently the al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria, is only a shade less bloodthirsty and generally holds them for ransom.

These are the two groups that dominate the armed opposition in Syria as a whole. In Aleppo, though only about 20 per cent of the 10,000 fighters are Nusra, it is they – along with their allies in Ahrar al-Sham – who are leading the resistance.

Unsurprisingly, foreign journalists covering developments in east Aleppo and rebel-held areas of Syria overwhelmingly do so from Lebanon or Turkey. A number of intrepid correspondents who tried to do eyewitness reporting from rebel-held areas swiftly found themselves tipped into the boots of cars or otherwise incarcerated.

Experience shows that foreign reporters are quite right not to trust their lives even to the most moderate of the armed opposition inside Syria. But, strangely enough, the same media organisations continue to put their trust in the veracity of information coming out of areas under the control of these same potential kidnappers and hostage takers. They would probably defend themselves by saying they rely on non-partisan activists, but all the evidence is that these can only operate in east Aleppo under license from the al-Qaeda-type groups.

It is inevitable that an opposition movement fighting for its life in wartime will only produce, or allow to be produced by others, information that is essentially propaganda for its own side. The fault lies not with them but a media that allows itself to be spoon-fed with dubious or one-sided stories.

For instance, the film coming out of east Aleppo in recent weeks focuses almost exclusively on heartrending scenes of human tragedy such as the death or maiming of civilians. One seldom sees shots of the 10,000 fighters, whether they are wounded or alive and well.

None of this is new. The present wars in the Middle East started with the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 which was justified by the supposed threat from Saddam Hussein’s possession of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Western journalists largely went along with this thesis, happily citing evidence from the Iraqi opposition who predictably confirmed the existence of WMD.

Some of those who produced these stories later had the gall to criticise the Iraqi opposition for misleading them, as if they had any right to expect unbiased information from people who had dedicated their lives to overthrowing Saddam Hussein or, in this particular case, getting the Americans to do so for them.

Much the same self-serving media credulity was evident in Libya during the 2011 Nato-backed uprising against Muammar Gaddafi.

Atrocity stories emanating from the Libyan opposition, many of which were subsequently proved to be baseless by human rights organisations, were rapidly promoted to lead the news, however partial the source.

The Syrian war is especially difficult to report because Isis and various al-Qaeda clones made it too dangerous to report from within opposition-held areas. There is a tremendous hunger for news from just such places, so the temptation is for the media give credence to information they get second hand from people who could in practice only operate if they belong to or are in sympathy with the dominant jihadi opposition groups.

It is always a weakness of journalists that they pretend to excavate the truth when in fact they are the conduit rather than the originator of information produced by others in their own interests. Reporters learn early that people tell them things because they are promoting some cause which might be their own career or related to bureaucratic infighting or, just possibly, hatred of lies and injustice.

A word here in defence of the humble reporter in the field: usually, it is not he or she, but the home office or media herd instinct, that decides the story of the day. Those closest to the action may be dubious about some juicy tale which is heading the news, but there is not much they can do about it.

Thus, in 2002 and 2003, several New York Times journalists wrote stories casting doubt on WMD only to find them buried deep inside the newspaper which was led by articles proving that Saddam had WMD and was a threat to the world.

Journalists and public alike should regard all information about Syria and Iraq with reasoned scepticism. They should keep in mind the words of Lakhdar Brahimi, the former UN and Arab League Special Envoy to Syria. Speaking after he had resigned in frustration in 2014, he said that “everybody had their agenda and the interests of the Syrian people came second, third or not at all”.

The quote comes from The Battle for Syria: International Rivalry in the New Middle East by Christopher Phillips, which is one of the best informed and non-partisan accounts of the Syrian tragedy yet published. He judiciously weighs the evidence for rival explanations for what happened and why. He understands the degree to which the agenda and pace events in Syria were determined externally by the intervention of foreign powers pursuing their own interests.

Overall, government experts did better than journalists, who bought into simple-minded explanations of developments, convinced that Assad was always on the verge of being overthrown.

Phillips records that at a high point of the popular uprising in July 2011, when the media was assuming that Assad was finished, that the long-serving British ambassador in Damascus, Simon Collis, wrote that “Assad can still probably count on the support of 30-40 per cent of the population.”

The French ambassador Eric Chevallier was similarly cautious, only to receive a classic rebuke from his masters in Paris who said: “Your information does not interest us. Bashar al-Assad must fall and will fall.”

Related Stories

]]>
http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/9-things-obama-could-do-leaving-office-slow-down-trumps-expansion-security-state9 Things Obama Could Do Before Leaving Office to Slow Down Trump's Expansion of the Security Statehttp://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/239078100/0/alternet_world

In less than seven weeks, President Barack Obama will hand over the government to Donald Trump, including access to the White House, Air Force One, and Camp David. Trump will also, of course, inherit the infamous nuclear codes, as well as the latest in warfare technology, including the Central Intelligence Agency’s fleet of killer drones, the National Security Agency’s vast surveillance and data collection apparatus, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s enormous system of undercover informants.

Before the recent election, Obama repeatedly warned that a Trump victory could spell disaster. “If somebody starts tweeting at three in the morning because SNL made fun of you, you can’t handle the nuclear codes,” Obama typically told a pro-Clinton rally in November. “Everything that we've done over the last eight years,” he added in an interview with MSNBC, “will be reversed with a Trump presidency.”

Yet, just days after Obama made those comments and Trump triumphed, the Guardian reported that his administration was deeply involved in planning to give Trump access not just to those nuclear codes, but also to the massive new spying and killing system that Obama personally helped shape and lead. “Obama’s failure to rein in George Bush’s national security policies hands Donald Trump a fully loaded weapon,” Anthony Romero, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, observed recently. “The president’s failure to understand that these powers could not be entrusted in the hands of any president, not even his, have now put us in a position where they are in the hands of Donald Trump.”

In many areas, it hardly matters what Barack Obama now does. In his last moments, for example, were he to make good on his first Oval Office promise and shut down the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Trump could reverse that decision with the stroke of a pen on January 20, 2017.

So, at this late date, what might a president frightened by his successor actually do, if not to hamper Trump's ability to create global mayhem, then at least to set the record straight before he leaves the White House?

Unfortunately, the answer is: far less than we might like, but as it happens, there are still some powers a president has that are irreversible by their very nature. For example, declassifying secret documents. Once such documents have been released, no power on earth can take them back. The president also has a virtually unlimited power of pardon. And finally, the president can punish high-level executive branch or military officials who abused the system, just as President Obama recalled General Stanley McChrystal from his post in Afghanistan in 2010, and he can do so until January 19th. Of course, Trump could rehire such individuals, but fast action by Obama could at least put them on trial in the media, if nowhere else.

Here are nine recommendations for action the president couldl take in his last 40 days when it comes to those three categories: publish, punish and pardon.

Drones

1. Name innocent drone victims. Last July, the Obama administration quietly released a statement in which it admitted that it had killed between 64 and 116 innocent people in 473 drone strikes in Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen between January 2009 and the end of 2015. (Never mind that the reliable Bureau of Investigative Journalism, based in Britain, has recorded a total closer to 800 innocent deaths from the same set of strikes.)

President Obama should immediately name those innocent people his administration has admitted killing, while providing the dates and locations of the incidents, where known. There is a precedent for this: on April 23, 2015, Obama apologized for the deaths in a drone strike in Pakistan of Giovanni Lo Porto and Warren Weinstein, an Italian and an American held captive by Al Qaeda, whom he identified by name. Why not release the names of the rest?

Faisal bin Ali Jaber, a Yemeni engineer, has been asking for just such a response. His brother-in-law Salem and nephew Waleed were killed by a U.S. drone strike in 2012. Yemeni officials gave Jaber $100,000 in cash that they swore was compensation from the U.S. government, but if so, Washington has not acknowledged what it did. Reprieve, a British-based group that supports drone victims, has sued President Obama to get a public apology for Jaber.

2. Make public any reviews of military errors. When Obama apologized for the killings of Lo Porto and Weinstein, he said that he had ordered a full review of any mistakes made in that drone strike. “We will identify the lessons that can be learned from this tragedy and any changes that should be made,” he announced. Until January 20th, he has the power to make such documents public and prove that lessons have actually been learned. (The only document available on the subject to date is the $1.2 million settlement agreement between Lo Porto’s parents and the U.S. embassy in Rome published by Stefania Maurizi in the Italian newspaper L’Espresso.)

There is precedent for such publication. The Pentagon released transcripts and data from an airstrike that resulted in the killing of 23 Afghan villagers on February 21, 2010, in Uruzgan Province after a drone crew mistook them for Taliban militants. Documents relating to U.S. air strikes against a Médecins Sans Frontières hospital in the Afghan city of Kunduz on October 3, 2015, have also been released.

How many similar military investigations (known as AR 15-6 reviews) have been conducted into accidental killings in the war on terror? According to Airwars, another British-based organization, we know, for instance, that the U.S. is looking into a strike that killed at least 56 civilians in Manbij, Syria, this past July. There are guaranteed to be many more such investigations that have never seen the light of day.

The Obama administration consistently claims that groups like Airwars and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism do not have the full story. This flies in the face of multiple reports from Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Al-Karama, researchers at Stanford and Columbia universities, and even the United Nations, all of whom have investigated and identified a growing number of drone-strike deaths among those without any links to terror or insurgent movements. If evidence to the contrary really exists, this would be the moment for Obama to prove them wrong, rather than simply letting more “collateral damage” be piled on his legacy.

3. Make public the administration’s criteria for 'targeted killings.' In July and August, under pressure from the American Civil Liberties Union, the Obama administration released a series of documents revealing the procedures it uses to identify and target for assassination individuals responsible for terrorist activities in much of the world -- and the way it has justified such killings internally. If anything, however, those documents (known as the presidential policy guidance, or PPG) have merely suggested how much of the process still remains beyond public view.

“Frustratingly, too much remains secret about the program, including where the PPG actually applies, what its general standards mean in practice, and how evidence that those standards have been met is evaluated -- in addition to who the government is killing, and where,” writes Brett Max Kaufman, an ACLU staff attorney.

When Donald Trump first sends out a CIA drone to kill someone chosen by his White House, he will be able to claim that he is doing so under the secret system set up by Obama. Without access to the procedures that Obama pioneered, we will have no way of knowing whether Trump will be telling the truth.

None of these three suggestions would be difficult or even controversial (though don’t hold your breath waiting for them to happen). With each, Obama could increase transparency before he inevitably hands over control of the targeted-killing program to Trump. None of this would even faze a future Trump administration, however. So here are a few suggestions of things that might matter for all of us if Obama did them before Trump enters the Oval Office.

Surveillance

4. Disclose mass surveillance programs.Even though Senator Obama opposed the collection of data from U.S. citizens, President Obama has vigorously defended the staggering expansion of the national security state during his two terms in office. "You can't have 100% security and also then have 100% privacy and zero inconvenience," he said in 2013, days after Edward Snowden leaked a trove of National Security Agency data that transformed our view of what our government has collected about all of us. "You know, we're going to have to make some choices as a society."

Thanks to Snowden, we also now know that the U.S. government secretly received permission from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to collect all U.S. telephone metadata via programs like Stellarwind; created a program called Prism to tunnel directly into the servers of nine major Internet companies; tapped the global fiber optic cables that lie on the ocean beds; collected text messages via a program called Dishfire; set up a vast database called X-Keyscore to track all the data from any given individual; and even built a program, Optic Nerve, to turn on users’ webcams, allowing for the collection of substantial quantities of sexually explicit communications. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. (For a searchable index of all such revelations so far, click here.)

Ironically, a report from the FBI that was finally published in April 2015 shows that this vast effort was largely useless in identifying terrorists. “In 2004, the FBI looked at a sampling of all the [Stellarwind] tips to see how many had made a ‘significant contribution’ to identifying a terrorist, deporting a terrorism suspect, or developing a confidential informant about terrorists,” wroteNew York Times reporter Charlie Savage who spent years fighting for access to the documents. “Just 1.2 percent of the tips from 2001 to 2004 had made such a contribution. Two years later, the FBI reviewed all the leads from the warrantless wiretapping part of Stellarwind between August 2004 and January 2006. None had proved useful.”

These days smart criminals and terrorists use encryption or other means like burner phones to make sure that they can’t be followed. The only senior operatives being hacked these days seem to be Democratic Party officials like John Podesta and millions of ordinary citizens whose data is stolen by criminals. So why not reveal just what programs the government used in these years, what was done with them, why it failed, and what lessons were (or weren’t) learned? Evidence of the national security state’s massive waste of time and resources might indeed be useful for us to have as we think about how to improve our less than 100% privacy and security. Such disclosures would not imperil the government’s ability to seek warrants to lawfully intercept information from those suspected of criminal wrongdoing or terrorism.

5. Make public all surveillance agreements with private companies. To this day, the U.S. government has secret agreements with a variety of data companies to trawl for information. Some companies are deeply uneasy about this invasion of their customers’ privacy, if only because it probably violates the terms of service they have agreed to and could cause them to lose business (given that they face competition from non-U.S. companies and more secure alternatives).

Take Yahoo, for example. The Justice Department obtained a court order in 2015 to search all users’ incoming emails for a unique computer code supposedly tied to the communications of a state-sponsored “terrorist” organization. The company has requested that the government declassify the order to clear its name. It has yet to do so.

Of course, not all companies are as eager to see their government deals revealed. Consider AT&T, the telecommunications giant. Police departments across the country pay it as much as $100,000 a year for special access to the telephone records of its clients (without first obtaining a warrant). The program is called “Hemisphere” and the company requires buyers to keep its existence secret.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based activist group, calls this “evidence laundering.” As Adam Schwartz, senior staff attorney on the Electronic Frontier Foundation's civil liberties team, puts it: "When police hide their sources of evidence, the accused cannot challenge the quality or veracity of the government’s investigation, or seek out favorable information still in the government’s possession. Moreover, hiding evidence from individuals who are prosecuted as a result of such surveillance is antithetical to our fundamental right to an open criminal justice system."

Surely such an argument ought to convince a former law professor? President Obama could easily strike a major blow for fair trials by revealing the extent and the details of these local police contracts, which are essentially an open secret, as well as any other agreements the national security state has with private companies to spy on ordinary citizens. Once again, this would not hamper the government’s ability to seek warrants when it can convince a judge that it needs to intercept individual communications.

6. Make public all secret law created in recent years. The last thing we’d want would be for Donald Trump and his future White House adviser, white nationalist Steve Bannon, to enter the Oval Office and start making secret law by wielding executive powers to, say, round up Muslims or deny women their rights.

Stopping Trump from taking this route and creating his own body of secret law is going to be hard indeed, given that Obama has probably signed more secret orders than any previous president. As Elizabeth Goitein, the co-director of the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program, noted in a recent report, the Obama administration has failed to release a minimum of 74 of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel opinions and memos that have been the secret basis for government actions on national security issues -- including detention, interrogation, intelligence activities, intelligence-sharing, and responses to terrorism. In addition, as many as 30 rulings of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court between 2003 and 2013 have not been made public. And an astonishing 807 international agreements, including bilateral ones to control the transportation of narcotics, signed by the U.S. between 2004 and 2014 have never seen the light of day.

Trump, of course, has refused even to publish his tax returns (previously a presidential campaign ritual), so if Obama doesn’t come clean, don’t expect Trump to release any of the secret law his predecessor made in the next four years. This moment, then, represents a unique opportunity for the president to fulfill his promise of 2009 to create the most open presidency of all time. Sadly, no one expects him to do so. The Obama administration has apparently “abandoned even the appearance of transparency,” according to Anne Weisman, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a nonpartisan NGO that tracks government accountability.

Since it’s very unlikely that Obama will reverse course on surveillance and secret law in the next 40 days, here at least are some suggestions on what he might still accomplish as the nation’s chief law enforcer.

Punish

7. Punish anyone who abused the drone or surveillance programs. We don’t really know who ordered the drone strikes that knocked off so many innocent people.But the names of the architects of the program are known and, more importantly, the president undoubtedly has all the names he needs.

And if Obama does want to clean house before Trump takes over, why not identify and dismiss the individuals who designed the NSA’s surveillance programs that infringed in major ways on our privacy without uncovering any terrorists?

8. Punish those responsible for FBI Domain Management abuses. Since the attacks of 9/11, the FBI has developed a network of more than 15,000 informants as part of its Domain Management program. Many of them were recruited to infiltrate Muslim communities to identify terrorists. For the last 15 years, this vast sting program has been used to round-up Muslims -- those dumb enough to fall for FBI enticements at least -- and put them in prison.

In the process, plenty of “terror operations” were created, but few real ones broken. We already know the details of many of the abuses involved. Back in 2011, for instance, a Mother Jones investigation found that 49 “successful” prosecutions of “terrorists” were the result of sting operations set up by FBI agents provocateurs. “You realize that many of these people would never have committed a crime if not for law enforcement encouraging, pressuring, and sometimes paying them to commit terrorist acts,” Andrea Prasow of Human Rights Watch wrote in a report on the program in 2014.

Whistleblowers have come forward to expose the abusive tactics employed by the FBI in such cases. Take Craig Monteilh, an ex-convict hired by the Bureau to infiltrate mosques in southern California. After he had a change of heart, Monteilh helped local Muslims sue the agency. The case was, in the end, reluctantly dismissed by District Judge Cormac Carney who wrote that "the state secrets privilege may unfortunately mean the sacrifice of individual liberties for the sake of national security." Other informants, like Saeed Torres, have since come forward to expose other aspects of the program. The government has never acknowledged any of this.

It is very likely that this same group will be called upon to support Donald Trump’s orders if a Muslim registry is ever set up. So this would be the moment for Obama to crack down in some fashion on this hapless system of profiling and entrapment before the Trump administration can expand it.

Pardon

9. Pardon Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning and the other whistleblowers. Last but not least, why not pardon Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning and the other whistleblowers who served the public good by letting us know what the president wouldn’t? As of now, Barack Obama will go down in history as the president who prosecuted more truth-tellers, often under the draconian World War I-era Espionage Act, than all other presidents combined. Stephen Kim, Jeffrey Sterling, John Kiriakou, and Thomas Drake were government officials who talked with journalists. They were subsequently jailed or had their lives turned upside down. Others like Chelsea Manning and Barrett Brown have been jailed for hacking or for the release of documents relating to surveillance, U.S. wars abroad, and other national security matters.

Gabe Rottman of the ACLU sums the situation up this way: “By my count, the Obama administration has secured 526 months of prison time for national security leakers, versus only 24 months total jail time for everyone else [who ever leaked] since the American Revolution.”

On this issue, Obama has already made his position clear enough. Of Snowden, in particular, he toldDer Spiegel earlier this month, “I can't pardon somebody who hasn't gone before a court and presented themselves.”

For a constitutional law professor, that’s a terrible argument. “The power of pardon conferred by the Constitution upon the President is unlimited except in cases of impeachment,” the Supreme Court ruled in 1866. “It extends to every offence known to the law, and may be exercised at any time after its commission, either before legal proceedings are taken or during their pendency, or after conviction and judgment. The power is not subject to legislative control.”

It also flies in the face of history and of the president’s own actions. “Richard Nixon hadn’t even been indicted when Gerald Ford issued a full, free, and absolute pardon unto Richard Nixon,” comments the Pardon Snowden campaign. “Nor had the thousands of men who had evaded the Vietnam War draft, who were pardoned unconditionally by Jimmy Carter on his first day in office. President Obama himself pardoned three Iranian American men earlier this year in the framework of the nuclear deal with Iran. Like Snowden, the three had been indicted but hadn’t stood trial when they were pardoned.”

Given how rarely Obama has issued presidential pardons, it seems unlikely that he will act. “He’s pardoned fewer people than any president since James Garfield, who was fatally shot in 1881 after less than three months in office,” writes Steven Nelson at U.S. News & World Report. Indeed, Bush pardoned twice as many people as Obama in his first seven years in office, a record that he might want to ameliorate. (In fairness, it should be noted that Obama has set a record for commuting jail sentences.)

Will Obama act on any of these nine recommendations? Or will he simply hand over the vast, increasingly secretive national security state that he helped build to a man whom he once declared to be “unfit” not just for the presidency but even for a job at a retail store. “The guy says stuff nobody would find tolerable if they were applying for a job at 7-Eleven,” President Obama told an election rally in October.

Now, it’s his move. Forget about 7-Eleven; Obama will not have to apply for, or campaign for, his next well-paid job, whatever it may be. But there is the little matter of his legacy, of truth, and oh, yes, of the future security of the country.

In less than seven weeks, President Barack Obama will hand over the government to Donald Trump, including access to the White House, Air Force One, and Camp David. Trump will also, of course, inherit the infamous nuclear codes, as well as the latest in warfare technology, including the Central Intelligence Agency’s fleet of killer drones, the National Security Agency’s vast surveillance and data collection apparatus, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s enormous system of undercover informants.

Before the recent election, Obama repeatedly warned that a Trump victory could spell disaster. “If somebody starts tweeting at three in the morning because SNL made fun of you, you can’t handle the nuclear codes,” Obama typically told a pro-Clinton rally in November. “Everything that we've done over the last eight years,” he added in an interview with MSNBC, “will be reversed with a Trump presidency.”

Yet, just days after Obama made those comments and Trump triumphed, the Guardian reported that his administration was deeply involved in planning to give Trump access not just to those nuclear codes, but also to the massive new spying and killing system that Obama personally helped shape and lead. “Obama’s failure to rein in George Bush’s national security policies hands Donald Trump a fully loaded weapon,” Anthony Romero, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, observed recently. “The president’s failure to understand that these powers could not be entrusted in the hands of any president, not even his, have now put us in a position where they are in the hands of Donald Trump.”

In many areas, it hardly matters what Barack Obama now does. In his last moments, for example, were he to make good on his first Oval Office promise and shut down the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Trump could reverse that decision with the stroke of a pen on January 20, 2017.

So, at this late date, what might a president frightened by his successor actually do, if not to hamper Trump's ability to create global mayhem, then at least to set the record straight before he leaves the White House?

Unfortunately, the answer is: far less than we might like, but as it happens, there are still some powers a president has that are irreversible by their very nature. For example, declassifying secret documents. Once such documents have been released, no power on earth can take them back. The president also has a virtually unlimited power of pardon. And finally, the president can punish high-level executive branch or military officials who abused the system, just as President Obama recalled General Stanley McChrystal from his post in Afghanistan in 2010, and he can do so until January 19th. Of course, Trump could rehire such individuals, but fast action by Obama could at least put them on trial in the media, if nowhere else.

Here are nine recommendations for action the president couldl take in his last 40 days when it comes to those three categories: publish, punish and pardon.

Drones

1. Name innocent drone victims. Last July, the Obama administration quietly released a statement in which it admitted that it had killed between 64 and 116 innocent people in 473 drone strikes in Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen between January 2009 and the end of 2015. (Never mind that the reliable Bureau of Investigative Journalism, based in Britain, has recorded a total closer to 800 innocent deaths from the same set of strikes.)

President Obama should immediately name those innocent people his administration has admitted killing, while providing the dates and locations of the incidents, where known. There is a precedent for this: on April 23, 2015, Obama apologized for the deaths in a drone strike in Pakistan of Giovanni Lo Porto and Warren Weinstein, an Italian and an American held captive by Al Qaeda, whom he identified by name. Why not release the names of the rest?

Faisal bin Ali Jaber, a Yemeni engineer, has been asking for just such a response. His brother-in-law Salem and nephew Waleed were killed by a U.S. drone strike in 2012. Yemeni officials gave Jaber $100,000 in cash that they swore was compensation from the U.S. government, but if so, Washington has not acknowledged what it did. Reprieve, a British-based group that supports drone victims, has sued President Obama to get a public apology for Jaber.

2. Make public any reviews of military errors. When Obama apologized for the killings of Lo Porto and Weinstein, he said that he had ordered a full review of any mistakes made in that drone strike. “We will identify the lessons that can be learned from this tragedy and any changes that should be made,” he announced. Until January 20th, he has the power to make such documents public and prove that lessons have actually been learned. (The only document available on the subject to date is the $1.2 million settlement agreement between Lo Porto’s parents and the U.S. embassy in Rome published by Stefania Maurizi in the Italian newspaper L’Espresso.)

There is precedent for such publication. The Pentagon released transcripts and data from an airstrike that resulted in the killing of 23 Afghan villagers on February 21, 2010, in Uruzgan Province after a drone crew mistook them for Taliban militants. Documents relating to U.S. air strikes against a Médecins Sans Frontières hospital in the Afghan city of Kunduz on October 3, 2015, have also been released.

How many similar military investigations (known as AR 15-6 reviews) have been conducted into accidental killings in the war on terror? According to Airwars, another British-based organization, we know, for instance, that the U.S. is looking into a strike that killed at least 56 civilians in Manbij, Syria, this past July. There are guaranteed to be many more such investigations that have never seen the light of day.

The Obama administration consistently claims that groups like Airwars and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism do not have the full story. This flies in the face of multiple reports from Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Al-Karama, researchers at Stanford and Columbia universities, and even the United Nations, all of whom have investigated and identified a growing number of drone-strike deaths among those without any links to terror or insurgent movements. If evidence to the contrary really exists, this would be the moment for Obama to prove them wrong, rather than simply letting more “collateral damage” be piled on his legacy.

3. Make public the administration’s criteria for 'targeted killings.' In July and August, under pressure from the American Civil Liberties Union, the Obama administration released a series of documents revealing the procedures it uses to identify and target for assassination individuals responsible for terrorist activities in much of the world -- and the way it has justified such killings internally. If anything, however, those documents (known as the presidential policy guidance, or PPG) have merely suggested how much of the process still remains beyond public view.

“Frustratingly, too much remains secret about the program, including where the PPG actually applies, what its general standards mean in practice, and how evidence that those standards have been met is evaluated -- in addition to who the government is killing, and where,” writes Brett Max Kaufman, an ACLU staff attorney.

When Donald Trump first sends out a CIA drone to kill someone chosen by his White House, he will be able to claim that he is doing so under the secret system set up by Obama. Without access to the procedures that Obama pioneered, we will have no way of knowing whether Trump will be telling the truth.

None of these three suggestions would be difficult or even controversial (though don’t hold your breath waiting for them to happen). With each, Obama could increase transparency before he inevitably hands over control of the targeted-killing program to Trump. None of this would even faze a future Trump administration, however. So here are a few suggestions of things that might matter for all of us if Obama did them before Trump enters the Oval Office.

Surveillance

4. Disclose mass surveillance programs.Even though Senator Obama opposed the collection of data from U.S. citizens, President Obama has vigorously defended the staggering expansion of the national security state during his two terms in office. "You can't have 100% security and also then have 100% privacy and zero inconvenience," he said in 2013, days after Edward Snowden leaked a trove of National Security Agency data that transformed our view of what our government has collected about all of us. "You know, we're going to have to make some choices as a society."

Thanks to Snowden, we also now know that the U.S. government secretly received permission from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to collect all U.S. telephone metadata via programs like Stellarwind; created a program called Prism to tunnel directly into the servers of nine major Internet companies; tapped the global fiber optic cables that lie on the ocean beds; collected text messages via a program called Dishfire; set up a vast database called X-Keyscore to track all the data from any given individual; and even built a program, Optic Nerve, to turn on users’ webcams, allowing for the collection of substantial quantities of sexually explicit communications. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. (For a searchable index of all such revelations so far, click here.)

Ironically, a report from the FBI that was finally published in April 2015 shows that this vast effort was largely useless in identifying terrorists. “In 2004, the FBI looked at a sampling of all the [Stellarwind] tips to see how many had made a ‘significant contribution’ to identifying a terrorist, deporting a terrorism suspect, or developing a confidential informant about terrorists,” wroteNew York Times reporter Charlie Savage who spent years fighting for access to the documents. “Just 1.2 percent of the tips from 2001 to 2004 had made such a contribution. Two years later, the FBI reviewed all the leads from the warrantless wiretapping part of Stellarwind between August 2004 and January 2006. None had proved useful.”

These days smart criminals and terrorists use encryption or other means like burner phones to make sure that they can’t be followed. The only senior operatives being hacked these days seem to be Democratic Party officials like John Podesta and millions of ordinary citizens whose data is stolen by criminals. So why not reveal just what programs the government used in these years, what was done with them, why it failed, and what lessons were (or weren’t) learned? Evidence of the national security state’s massive waste of time and resources might indeed be useful for us to have as we think about how to improve our less than 100% privacy and security. Such disclosures would not imperil the government’s ability to seek warrants to lawfully intercept information from those suspected of criminal wrongdoing or terrorism.

5. Make public all surveillance agreements with private companies. To this day, the U.S. government has secret agreements with a variety of data companies to trawl for information. Some companies are deeply uneasy about this invasion of their customers’ privacy, if only because it probably violates the terms of service they have agreed to and could cause them to lose business (given that they face competition from non-U.S. companies and more secure alternatives).

Take Yahoo, for example. The Justice Department obtained a court order in 2015 to search all users’ incoming emails for a unique computer code supposedly tied to the communications of a state-sponsored “terrorist” organization. The company has requested that the government declassify the order to clear its name. It has yet to do so.

Of course, not all companies are as eager to see their government deals revealed. Consider AT&T, the telecommunications giant. Police departments across the country pay it as much as $100,000 a year for special access to the telephone records of its clients (without first obtaining a warrant). The program is called “Hemisphere” and the company requires buyers to keep its existence secret.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based activist group, calls this “evidence laundering.” As Adam Schwartz, senior staff attorney on the Electronic Frontier Foundation's civil liberties team, puts it: "When police hide their sources of evidence, the accused cannot challenge the quality or veracity of the government’s investigation, or seek out favorable information still in the government’s possession. Moreover, hiding evidence from individuals who are prosecuted as a result of such surveillance is antithetical to our fundamental right to an open criminal justice system."

Surely such an argument ought to convince a former law professor? President Obama could easily strike a major blow for fair trials by revealing the extent and the details of these local police contracts, which are essentially an open secret, as well as any other agreements the national security state has with private companies to spy on ordinary citizens. Once again, this would not hamper the government’s ability to seek warrants when it can convince a judge that it needs to intercept individual communications.

6. Make public all secret law created in recent years. The last thing we’d want would be for Donald Trump and his future White House adviser, white nationalist Steve Bannon, to enter the Oval Office and start making secret law by wielding executive powers to, say, round up Muslims or deny women their rights.

Stopping Trump from taking this route and creating his own body of secret law is going to be hard indeed, given that Obama has probably signed more secret orders than any previous president. As Elizabeth Goitein, the co-director of the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program, noted in a recent report, the Obama administration has failed to release a minimum of 74 of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel opinions and memos that have been the secret basis for government actions on national security issues -- including detention, interrogation, intelligence activities, intelligence-sharing, and responses to terrorism. In addition, as many as 30 rulings of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court between 2003 and 2013 have not been made public. And an astonishing 807 international agreements, including bilateral ones to control the transportation of narcotics, signed by the U.S. between 2004 and 2014 have never seen the light of day.

Trump, of course, has refused even to publish his tax returns (previously a presidential campaign ritual), so if Obama doesn’t come clean, don’t expect Trump to release any of the secret law his predecessor made in the next four years. This moment, then, represents a unique opportunity for the president to fulfill his promise of 2009 to create the most open presidency of all time. Sadly, no one expects him to do so. The Obama administration has apparently “abandoned even the appearance of transparency,” according to Anne Weisman, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a nonpartisan NGO that tracks government accountability.

Since it’s very unlikely that Obama will reverse course on surveillance and secret law in the next 40 days, here at least are some suggestions on what he might still accomplish as the nation’s chief law enforcer.

Punish

7. Punish anyone who abused the drone or surveillance programs. We don’t really know who ordered the drone strikes that knocked off so many innocent people.But the names of the architects of the program are known and, more importantly, the president undoubtedly has all the names he needs.

And if Obama does want to clean house before Trump takes over, why not identify and dismiss the individuals who designed the NSA’s surveillance programs that infringed in major ways on our privacy without uncovering any terrorists?

8. Punish those responsible for FBI Domain Management abuses. Since the attacks of 9/11, the FBI has developed a network of more than 15,000 informants as part of its Domain Management program. Many of them were recruited to infiltrate Muslim communities to identify terrorists. For the last 15 years, this vast sting program has been used to round-up Muslims -- those dumb enough to fall for FBI enticements at least -- and put them in prison.

In the process, plenty of “terror operations” were created, but few real ones broken. We already know the details of many of the abuses involved. Back in 2011, for instance, a Mother Jones investigation found that 49 “successful” prosecutions of “terrorists” were the result of sting operations set up by FBI agents provocateurs. “You realize that many of these people would never have committed a crime if not for law enforcement encouraging, pressuring, and sometimes paying them to commit terrorist acts,” Andrea Prasow of Human Rights Watch wrote in a report on the program in 2014.

Whistleblowers have come forward to expose the abusive tactics employed by the FBI in such cases. Take Craig Monteilh, an ex-convict hired by the Bureau to infiltrate mosques in southern California. After he had a change of heart, Monteilh helped local Muslims sue the agency. The case was, in the end, reluctantly dismissed by District Judge Cormac Carney who wrote that "the state secrets privilege may unfortunately mean the sacrifice of individual liberties for the sake of national security." Other informants, like Saeed Torres, have since come forward to expose other aspects of the program. The government has never acknowledged any of this.

It is very likely that this same group will be called upon to support Donald Trump’s orders if a Muslim registry is ever set up. So this would be the moment for Obama to crack down in some fashion on this hapless system of profiling and entrapment before the Trump administration can expand it.

Pardon

9. Pardon Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning and the other whistleblowers. Last but not least, why not pardon Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning and the other whistleblowers who served the public good by letting us know what the president wouldn’t? As of now, Barack Obama will go down in history as the president who prosecuted more truth-tellers, often under the draconian World War I-era Espionage Act, than all other presidents combined. Stephen Kim, Jeffrey Sterling, John Kiriakou, and Thomas Drake were government officials who talked with journalists. They were subsequently jailed or had their lives turned upside down. Others like Chelsea Manning and Barrett Brown have been jailed for hacking or for the release of documents relating to surveillance, U.S. wars abroad, and other national security matters.

Gabe Rottman of the ACLU sums the situation up this way: “By my count, the Obama administration has secured 526 months of prison time for national security leakers, versus only 24 months total jail time for everyone else [who ever leaked] since the American Revolution.”

On this issue, Obama has already made his position clear enough. Of Snowden, in particular, he toldDer Spiegel earlier this month, “I can't pardon somebody who hasn't gone before a court and presented themselves.”

For a constitutional law professor, that’s a terrible argument. “The power of pardon conferred by the Constitution upon the President is unlimited except in cases of impeachment,” the Supreme Court ruled in 1866. “It extends to every offence known to the law, and may be exercised at any time after its commission, either before legal proceedings are taken or during their pendency, or after conviction and judgment. The power is not subject to legislative control.”

It also flies in the face of history and of the president’s own actions. “Richard Nixon hadn’t even been indicted when Gerald Ford issued a full, free, and absolute pardon unto Richard Nixon,” comments the Pardon Snowden campaign. “Nor had the thousands of men who had evaded the Vietnam War draft, who were pardoned unconditionally by Jimmy Carter on his first day in office. President Obama himself pardoned three Iranian American men earlier this year in the framework of the nuclear deal with Iran. Like Snowden, the three had been indicted but hadn’t stood trial when they were pardoned.”

Given how rarely Obama has issued presidential pardons, it seems unlikely that he will act. “He’s pardoned fewer people than any president since James Garfield, who was fatally shot in 1881 after less than three months in office,” writes Steven Nelson at U.S. News & World Report. Indeed, Bush pardoned twice as many people as Obama in his first seven years in office, a record that he might want to ameliorate. (In fairness, it should be noted that Obama has set a record for commuting jail sentences.)

Will Obama act on any of these nine recommendations? Or will he simply hand over the vast, increasingly secretive national security state that he helped build to a man whom he once declared to be “unfit” not just for the presidency but even for a job at a retail store. “The guy says stuff nobody would find tolerable if they were applying for a job at 7-Eleven,” President Obama told an election rally in October.

Now, it’s his move. Forget about 7-Eleven; Obama will not have to apply for, or campaign for, his next well-paid job, whatever it may be. But there is the little matter of his legacy, of truth, and oh, yes, of the future security of the country.

The December meeting to unify global antiwar movements was organized by CodePink.

After 14 years of costly war based on lies, it’s time for truth and accountability. The People's Tribunal on the Iraq War will unify the global antiwar/peace movements with other justice movements by uplifting testimonies of the costs of this war. The Tribunal, organized by CodePink, will bring the lies that created the war on Iraq into public awareness, while demanding President Obama act on them. It will build and inspire the antiwar movement that we will need after the inauguration of the next administration in 2017. It will be a tool all groups can use to build, inspire and enliven their organizations and communities.

CODEPINK started as a response to Bush’s terrorists lies as the visual terrorist codes of yellow, red and orange.

\We called CODEPINK for peace.

Now after 14 years standing in everyway we could imagine we decided to build something that would be valuable after the elections to stand again in the way of more war. Something that could heal and build the movement. We need to stand in the way of more lies, wars and costs depleting the needs of our cities.

I have been blessed to work along side some of the most caring, generous, passionate fighters for peace and justice. They are internationalist. they understand it is all connected. They risk and give their lives for peace, real peace. There are millions, we know that between 12 and 15 million of us were in the streets saying no to war just days before Shock and Awe hit Baghdad. I was in Baghdad when Colin Powell lied to the world about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. I had been with the weapons inspectors that day at an earlier press conference assuring us there were none.

But the next morning we learned that Bush had followed that lie with the Game Is Over, now we launch Shock and Awe. An Iraqi women came into our room that morning looked to the sky and asked what was she going to do to protect her children, as I went down to the streets people were taping the windows and building generators for electricity. I watched them be terrorized just by the idea of shock and awe. But as we hear the stories from Iraq now, NO ONE could have imagined, even in all our fear and warnings how utterly devastating the situation is for everyone, including those in the US.

Since 9/11 it is estimated the cost of our response will be 5 Trillion dollars. Instead billionaires have been made and the bottom of the world has gotten poorer. Te US invested in destruction instead of peace.

This tribunal speaks to the lies and costs of the Iraq War. But the lies about war go back to the Korean War and follows from there. The costs of war are born by those who are not on the front pages of papers or even in the history books. we wanted to create a place where people could come, see 4 to 5 minutes from someone who with experience related to the Iraq War and follow the testimonies you hear today into the volumes of testimonies those you hear from today have offered the world in the form of articles, testimonies to Congress, books, movies, marches, and none stop offerings of the truth in the face of lies, often to personal costs and too often time in jail.

Today is just the beginning; this Tribunal will live on line and continue to grow. It will be a tool for study, for research and for history. What we care most is that it is serves as a warning that war comes from lies and their are innumerable costs and violence begets violence. There were many others who wanted to join but we have only two days to share many voices.

We hope you will stay engaged, will share your stories and your concerns. We hope this begins a conversation about how we cannot normalize violence. Join us.

Last weekend I was in Standing Rock; there were many moments where memories from Iraq returned. Starting with the beauty and kindness of the people, the generosity and capacity to be in relationship. But Standing Rock is also about lies and I hate to think of the costs of lives when the Missouri River is contaminated with oil, as all pipelines leak.

From Iraq to Standing Rock we must continue to resist the lies and refuse to pay the costs and instead create cultures of peace together.

The December meeting to unify global antiwar movements was organized by CodePink.

After 14 years of costly war based on lies, it’s time for truth and accountability. The People's Tribunal on the Iraq War will unify the global antiwar/peace movements with other justice movements by uplifting testimonies of the costs of this war. The Tribunal, organized by CodePink, will bring the lies that created the war on Iraq into public awareness, while demanding President Obama act on them. It will build and inspire the antiwar movement that we will need after the inauguration of the next administration in 2017. It will be a tool all groups can use to build, inspire and enliven their organizations and communities.

CODEPINK started as a response to Bush’s terrorists lies as the visual terrorist codes of yellow, red and orange.

\We called CODEPINK for peace.

Now after 14 years standing in everyway we could imagine we decided to build something that would be valuable after the elections to stand again in the way of more war. Something that could heal and build the movement. We need to stand in the way of more lies, wars and costs depleting the needs of our cities.

I have been blessed to work along side some of the most caring, generous, passionate fighters for peace and justice. They are internationalist. they understand it is all connected. They risk and give their lives for peace, real peace. There are millions, we know that between 12 and 15 million of us were in the streets saying no to war just days before Shock and Awe hit Baghdad. I was in Baghdad when Colin Powell lied to the world about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. I had been with the weapons inspectors that day at an earlier press conference assuring us there were none.

But the next morning we learned that Bush had followed that lie with the Game Is Over, now we launch Shock and Awe. An Iraqi women came into our room that morning looked to the sky and asked what was she going to do to protect her children, as I went down to the streets people were taping the windows and building generators for electricity. I watched them be terrorized just by the idea of shock and awe. But as we hear the stories from Iraq now, NO ONE could have imagined, even in all our fear and warnings how utterly devastating the situation is for everyone, including those in the US.

Since 9/11 it is estimated the cost of our response will be 5 Trillion dollars. Instead billionaires have been made and the bottom of the world has gotten poorer. Te US invested in destruction instead of peace.

This tribunal speaks to the lies and costs of the Iraq War. But the lies about war go back to the Korean War and follows from there. The costs of war are born by those who are not on the front pages of papers or even in the history books. we wanted to create a place where people could come, see 4 to 5 minutes from someone who with experience related to the Iraq War and follow the testimonies you hear today into the volumes of testimonies those you hear from today have offered the world in the form of articles, testimonies to Congress, books, movies, marches, and none stop offerings of the truth in the face of lies, often to personal costs and too often time in jail.

Today is just the beginning; this Tribunal will live on line and continue to grow. It will be a tool for study, for research and for history. What we care most is that it is serves as a warning that war comes from lies and their are innumerable costs and violence begets violence. There were many others who wanted to join but we have only two days to share many voices.

We hope you will stay engaged, will share your stories and your concerns. We hope this begins a conversation about how we cannot normalize violence. Join us.

Last weekend I was in Standing Rock; there were many moments where memories from Iraq returned. Starting with the beauty and kindness of the people, the generosity and capacity to be in relationship. But Standing Rock is also about lies and I hate to think of the costs of lives when the Missouri River is contaminated with oil, as all pipelines leak.

From Iraq to Standing Rock we must continue to resist the lies and refuse to pay the costs and instead create cultures of peace together.

]]>
http://www.alternet.org/world/least-four-kinds-terrorism-are-targeting-our-grandchildren-none-them-what-donald-trump-wouldAt Least Four Kinds of Terrorism Are Targeting Our Grandchildren—None of Them What Donald Trump Would Have You Think http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/237386864/0/alternet_world

The forces that swept a narcissistic misogynist into office are gunning for us all.

Four decades of American narcissism and greed and exceptionalism have allowed the super-rich to dictate the future path of our nation. We're paying the price now, with environmental disasters, nonexistent savings for half of our families, Americans dying because of expensive health care, and a growing fear of blowback from desperate victims of our foreign wars.

The richest people in the world create most of the pollution, yet are the least likely to feel guilty about the effects of their behavior, and the least likely to suffer from the impending environmental damage. This could lead to terror-filled years for the generations to follow us. Even the CHANCE of such misery for their grandchildren should motivate the super-rich to address the root causes of global warming. Instead, they have plans to retreat to impregnable "safe rooms" with food and water, oxygen, medical supplies, and all the amenities for a year or more of underground living.

Disdain for the Taxes that Support Society

Charles Koch said, "I believe my business and non-profit investments are much more beneficial to societal well-being than sending more money to Washington."

Beneficial to society? Where is the incentive for Charles Koch, or any other billionaire beneficiary of decades of tax subsidies, to support the needs of average people?

The breakdown in taxes began in the 1970s, when University of Chicago economist Arthur Laffer convinced Dick Cheney and other Republican officials that lowering taxes on the rich would generate more revenue. Conservatives have contorted this economic theory into the belief that all tax reductions are beneficial. It was proved wrong from the start. Several economic studies have concluded that the revenue-maximizing top income tax rate is anywhere from 50% to 75%. Yet our next president wants to cut taxes on the rich.

There's little doubt that the perverse level of inequality caused by the Koch-like attitude led to the rebellion by once-middle-class white voters that swept a narcissistic misogynist into office. It could easily get worse, with our infrastructure crumbling and AI technology taking over mid-level jobs. Our grandchildren will face the economic terror trickling down from the greedy top.

Profiting from Our Health Problems

Instead of focusing on the likely risks of their product to human health, the sugar industry spent five decades blaming saturated fats rather than sugar for obesity, even paying handpicked Harvard scientists to support their view, while steering Americans to the low-fat, high-sugar diet that now seems much to blame for our health problems. The weight of the average American man has gone from 166 to 196 in the past fifty years. From 140 to 166 for women. The World Health Organization reports on the "unequivocal evidence" that childhood obesity is related in part to the intake of sugar.

Meanwhile, other deadly substances have been pushed on us. In the 1990s the pharmaceutical industry began a massive campaign to convince Americans that opioid medications were effective for chronic pain. Today more people use prescription opioids than use tobacco. Nearlyhalf of men without jobs are hooked on pain medication, much of it deemed unnecessary by the Annals of Surgery. About 75% of heroin addicts used prescription opioids before turning to heroin. Deaths related to heroin have nearly quadrupled in the past decade, and a dramatic surge in overdoses has occurred even among children.

These children, our own children and grandchildren, are facing the terrors of drug addiction and obesity-related diseases because of the self-serving corporate demand for profit over human need.

Blowback from Our Wars

Yemeni resident Baraa Shiban writes: "On December 12 a bride and groom traveled to their wedding in al-Baitha province, Yemen...A U.S. drone fired at the wedding procession, destroying five vehicles and killing most of their occupants."

The weapons we sell to Saudi Arabia are destroying villages in Yemen, killing entire families and leveling their homes, and bombingschools and hospitals and even funeral processions. Food lines are blocked at the Yemeni borders, hospitals have run out of medicine, and hundreds of thousands of children are at risk of starving to death. At least 10,000 civilians have been killed or wounded, and more than 400,000 families have lost their homes.

Shiban concludes: "Wronged and angry men are just the sort extreme groups like al Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula find easiest to recruit."

Every American should contemplate the levels of shock and sorrow and anger that WE WOULD FEEL if another nation bombed a wedding procession in the United States. Instead, with little reflection, we tolerate the ongoing slaughter of Middle East civilians, and we disregard the prospect of terror-filled years for our grandchildren. Only the cold hearts of war-profiteering capitalists seem immune to the pain and the danger.

The forces that swept a narcissistic misogynist into office are gunning for us all.

Four decades of American narcissism and greed and exceptionalism have allowed the super-rich to dictate the future path of our nation. We're paying the price now, with environmental disasters, nonexistent savings for half of our families, Americans dying because of expensive health care, and a growing fear of blowback from desperate victims of our foreign wars.

The richest people in the world create most of the pollution, yet are the least likely to feel guilty about the effects of their behavior, and the least likely to suffer from the impending environmental damage. This could lead to terror-filled years for the generations to follow us. Even the CHANCE of such misery for their grandchildren should motivate the super-rich to address the root causes of global warming. Instead, they have plans to retreat to impregnable "safe rooms" with food and water, oxygen, medical supplies, and all the amenities for a year or more of underground living.

Disdain for the Taxes that Support Society

Charles Koch said, "I believe my business and non-profit investments are much more beneficial to societal well-being than sending more money to Washington."

Beneficial to society? Where is the incentive for Charles Koch, or any other billionaire beneficiary of decades of tax subsidies, to support the needs of average people?

The breakdown in taxes began in the 1970s, when University of Chicago economist Arthur Laffer convinced Dick Cheney and other Republican officials that lowering taxes on the rich would generate more revenue. Conservatives have contorted this economic theory into the belief that all tax reductions are beneficial. It was proved wrong from the start. Several economic studies have concluded that the revenue-maximizing top income tax rate is anywhere from 50% to 75%. Yet our next president wants to cut taxes on the rich.

There's little doubt that the perverse level of inequality caused by the Koch-like attitude led to the rebellion by once-middle-class white voters that swept a narcissistic misogynist into office. It could easily get worse, with our infrastructure crumbling and AI technology taking over mid-level jobs. Our grandchildren will face the economic terror trickling down from the greedy top.

Profiting from Our Health Problems

Instead of focusing on the likely risks of their product to human health, the sugar industry spent five decades blaming saturated fats rather than sugar for obesity, even paying handpicked Harvard scientists to support their view, while steering Americans to the low-fat, high-sugar diet that now seems much to blame for our health problems. The weight of the average American man has gone from 166 to 196 in the past fifty years. From 140 to 166 for women. The World Health Organization reports on the "unequivocal evidence" that childhood obesity is related in part to the intake of sugar.

Meanwhile, other deadly substances have been pushed on us. In the 1990s the pharmaceutical industry began a massive campaign to convince Americans that opioid medications were effective for chronic pain. Today more people use prescription opioids than use tobacco. Nearlyhalf of men without jobs are hooked on pain medication, much of it deemed unnecessary by the Annals of Surgery. About 75% of heroin addicts used prescription opioids before turning to heroin. Deaths related to heroin have nearly quadrupled in the past decade, and a dramatic surge in overdoses has occurred even among children.

These children, our own children and grandchildren, are facing the terrors of drug addiction and obesity-related diseases because of the self-serving corporate demand for profit over human need.

Blowback from Our Wars

Yemeni resident Baraa Shiban writes: "On December 12 a bride and groom traveled to their wedding in al-Baitha province, Yemen...A U.S. drone fired at the wedding procession, destroying five vehicles and killing most of their occupants."

The weapons we sell to Saudi Arabia are destroying villages in Yemen, killing entire families and leveling their homes, and bombingschools and hospitals and even funeral processions. Food lines are blocked at the Yemeni borders, hospitals have run out of medicine, and hundreds of thousands of children are at risk of starving to death. At least 10,000 civilians have been killed or wounded, and more than 400,000 families have lost their homes.

Shiban concludes: "Wronged and angry men are just the sort extreme groups like al Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula find easiest to recruit."

Every American should contemplate the levels of shock and sorrow and anger that WE WOULD FEEL if another nation bombed a wedding procession in the United States. Instead, with little reflection, we tolerate the ongoing slaughter of Middle East civilians, and we disregard the prospect of terror-filled years for our grandchildren. Only the cold hearts of war-profiteering capitalists seem immune to the pain and the danger.

]]>
http://www.alternet.org/environment/environmentalists-are-being-murdered-frightening-rate-what-can-be-doneEnvironmentalists Are Being Murdered at a Frightening Rate: What Can Be Done?http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/237351428/0/alternet_world

At least 185 environmentalists were killed last year, the highest toll recorded.

Our world is engaged in many wars. Most are visible, taking up front-page headlines and minutes of presidential debates. Others lurk below the surface, masked by corporate interests that seek to perpetuate the current miasma known as late capitalism. Arguably the biggest of these invisible wars is the one being waged against the environment.

Despite how this may sound, it’s not some crackpot conspiracy. Earlier this year for instance, Senator Bernie Sanders clearly explained the terms of engagement. During that speech, the former presidential candidate specifically referred to the fossil fuel industry’s influence over politics. But there are many facets to this fight, and like any war, an increasing number of casualties.

According to a recent report by Global Witness, a U.K.-based environmental watchdog, at least 185 environmental activists were killed within the last year, marking it as the “highest annual death toll on record.” This represents a 60 percent increase in murders from the previous year. That's an average of three killings every week.

Thinking about environmental protection as a battleground, these figures show that the conflict is escalating, and that Brazil—which leads the country tally with 50 of the recorded deaths—is the single largest front line.

To better understand this worrying trend, look no further than the recent murder of Luiz Araújo, the environmental secretary to the Brazilian city of Altamira, located in the northern reaches of the Amazon. Araújo was responsible for enforcing environmental law in a place filled with plentiful natural resources, particularly trees. As a result, he found himself in a constant battle against those seeking to exploit those resources. In the last year alone, Araújo helped bring to light a massive illegal logging operation and tons of dead fish that had been hidden near a recently built hydroelectric dam on the outskirts of Altamira. Investigations would later reveal that Norte Energia, the company that built the dam, had illegally killed 16.2 tons of fish when they flooded the reservoir, a crime for which they were fined $11 million.

Araújo was killed in front of his family by two men earlier this month. After they shot him, the gunmen fled without taking anything, which has led to speculation that Araújo was likely assassinated. He wouldn’t be the first to die at the hands of hired gunmen, known locally as pistoleiros. When it comes to silencing environmental activists in Brazil, pistoleiros have become the preferred method.

“Communities that take a stand are increasingly finding themselves in the firing line of companies’ private security, state forces and a thriving market for contract killers,” Billy Kyte, author of the recent Global Witness report, explained to The Guardian. “As demand for products like minerals, timber and palm oil continues, governments, companies and criminal gangs are seizing land in defiance of the people who live on it.”

Commercial demand for natural resources is nothing new. So why is the death toll escalating? A 2012 Global Witness report described how “the race to secure access to these resources” is intensifying. Citing this report in the Smithsonian Magazine article "Why Do Environmentalists Keep Getting Killed Around the World?" author Scott Wallace described the rise in violence as reflective of the “expanding reach of the global economy into hitherto inaccessible hinterlands," adding that "these are regions where governance is shakiest and where traditional, subsistence-oriented communities find themselves."

The Global Witness report reflects this reality, noting that 40 percent of 2015's victims were indigenous people whom, the report found, are particularly vulnerable due to “weak land rights and geographic isolation.” Jane Cohen, an expert in environmental health at Human Rights Watch in New York City, told Wallace the escalating vulnerability of indigenous people is due to a lack of “support network” that could make the international community more aware of what’s happening in these communities.

“We may be seeing just the tip of a much larger iceberg,” added Bill Kovarik, a communications professor at Radford University in Virginia, who tracks reports of violence against environmental activists. “The world needs to be aware of the people who are dying to save what’s left of the natural environment.”

But is simply being more aware enough? In order for these murders to stop there needs to be better accountability. On a practical level, this is a problem because these crimes are often difficult to investigate due to their conspiratorial nature, which involves, as Wallace describes it, “a series of middlemen.”

As for state intervention, the picture isn’t much better. Take the case of Berta Cáceres, a fierce lands rights activist and co-founder of the National Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras, who was assassinated earlier this year in her home. Vijay Prashad, writing for Frontline India, reported on the follow-up to Cáceres murder, noting:

Investigation into the death of Berta Caceres is unlikely to be conducted with seriousness. The Honduran government suggested swiftly that it was likely that Castro had killed Berta Caceres and made false statements about assassins. That he had no motive to kill his friend and political ally seemed irrelevant.

Brazil unfortunately reflects a similar situation. Former president Dilma Rousseff made an attempt during her term to clamp down on these murders. However, Rousseff was impeached earlier this year, courtesy of a coup. The fact that this impeachment coincides with the escalating murders of environmental activists brings us full circle back to Sanders’ point, which the report itself reiterates as one of the primary forces that continue to fuel this war: “a powerful nexus of corporate and state interests.”

At least 185 environmentalists were killed last year, the highest toll recorded.

Our world is engaged in many wars. Most are visible, taking up front-page headlines and minutes of presidential debates. Others lurk below the surface, masked by corporate interests that seek to perpetuate the current miasma known as late capitalism. Arguably the biggest of these invisible wars is the one being waged against the environment.

Despite how this may sound, it’s not some crackpot conspiracy. Earlier this year for instance, Senator Bernie Sanders clearly explained the terms of engagement. During that speech, the former presidential candidate specifically referred to the fossil fuel industry’s influence over politics. But there are many facets to this fight, and like any war, an increasing number of casualties.

According to a recent report by Global Witness, a U.K.-based environmental watchdog, at least 185 environmental activists were killed within the last year, marking it as the “highest annual death toll on record.” This represents a 60 percent increase in murders from the previous year. That's an average of three killings every week.

Thinking about environmental protection as a battleground, these figures show that the conflict is escalating, and that Brazil—which leads the country tally with 50 of the recorded deaths—is the single largest front line.

To better understand this worrying trend, look no further than the recent murder of Luiz Araújo, the environmental secretary to the Brazilian city of Altamira, located in the northern reaches of the Amazon. Araújo was responsible for enforcing environmental law in a place filled with plentiful natural resources, particularly trees. As a result, he found himself in a constant battle against those seeking to exploit those resources. In the last year alone, Araújo helped bring to light a massive illegal logging operation and tons of dead fish that had been hidden near a recently built hydroelectric dam on the outskirts of Altamira. Investigations would later reveal that Norte Energia, the company that built the dam, had illegally killed 16.2 tons of fish when they flooded the reservoir, a crime for which they were fined $11 million.

Araújo was killed in front of his family by two men earlier this month. After they shot him, the gunmen fled without taking anything, which has led to speculation that Araújo was likely assassinated. He wouldn’t be the first to die at the hands of hired gunmen, known locally as pistoleiros. When it comes to silencing environmental activists in Brazil, pistoleiros have become the preferred method.

“Communities that take a stand are increasingly finding themselves in the firing line of companies’ private security, state forces and a thriving market for contract killers,” Billy Kyte, author of the recent Global Witness report, explained to The Guardian. “As demand for products like minerals, timber and palm oil continues, governments, companies and criminal gangs are seizing land in defiance of the people who live on it.”

Commercial demand for natural resources is nothing new. So why is the death toll escalating? A 2012 Global Witness report described how “the race to secure access to these resources” is intensifying. Citing this report in the Smithsonian Magazine article "Why Do Environmentalists Keep Getting Killed Around the World?" author Scott Wallace described the rise in violence as reflective of the “expanding reach of the global economy into hitherto inaccessible hinterlands," adding that "these are regions where governance is shakiest and where traditional, subsistence-oriented communities find themselves."

The Global Witness report reflects this reality, noting that 40 percent of 2015's victims were indigenous people whom, the report found, are particularly vulnerable due to “weak land rights and geographic isolation.” Jane Cohen, an expert in environmental health at Human Rights Watch in New York City, told Wallace the escalating vulnerability of indigenous people is due to a lack of “support network” that could make the international community more aware of what’s happening in these communities.

“We may be seeing just the tip of a much larger iceberg,” added Bill Kovarik, a communications professor at Radford University in Virginia, who tracks reports of violence against environmental activists. “The world needs to be aware of the people who are dying to save what’s left of the natural environment.”

But is simply being more aware enough? In order for these murders to stop there needs to be better accountability. On a practical level, this is a problem because these crimes are often difficult to investigate due to their conspiratorial nature, which involves, as Wallace describes it, “a series of middlemen.”

As for state intervention, the picture isn’t much better. Take the case of Berta Cáceres, a fierce lands rights activist and co-founder of the National Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras, who was assassinated earlier this year in her home. Vijay Prashad, writing for Frontline India, reported on the follow-up to Cáceres murder, noting:

Investigation into the death of Berta Caceres is unlikely to be conducted with seriousness. The Honduran government suggested swiftly that it was likely that Castro had killed Berta Caceres and made false statements about assassins. That he had no motive to kill his friend and political ally seemed irrelevant.

Brazil unfortunately reflects a similar situation. Former president Dilma Rousseff made an attempt during her term to clamp down on these murders. However, Rousseff was impeached earlier this year, courtesy of a coup. The fact that this impeachment coincides with the escalating murders of environmental activists brings us full circle back to Sanders’ point, which the report itself reiterates as one of the primary forces that continue to fuel this war: “a powerful nexus of corporate and state interests.”

Oceans have absorbed more than 93 percent of the heat generated by human activity since the 1970s, according to a report published this month by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources.

It says a “truly staggering” rise in temperature has caused chaos in the seas: dangerous microbes and cholera-carrying bacteria are breeding in warmer waters, along with toxic algae, which could poison fish and humans that eat them; coral reefs that provide the habitat for a quarter of the world’s marine species are dying; species including turtles, seabirds, and fish are being driven into cooler waters towards the poles.

For experts researching global fisheries, the IUCN report, compiled by 80 scientists in a dozen countries, landed with a dull thud on top of a growing pile of their own studies that show overfishing is already decimating stocks worldwide.

Dirk Zeller, executive director of the Sea Around Us research institute at Vancouver’s University of British Columbia, said it’s hard enough trying to convince countries to scale back fishing to sustainable rates. And as with overfishing, the warming seas won’t affect everyone equally.

"Who are the ones who are really going to pay the price? Poor, developing countries in the tropical zone,” he said in an interview at his UBC office.

After more than a decade of research, Zeller and his colleague Daniel Pauly published damning evidence earlier this year about the true extent of global overfishing. They noted that many people in developing countries depend on fish for protein as well as micronutrients that are essential for health. Locally caught fish are often the only source of those micronutrients, as people do not have access to micronutrients in meat, eggs, vitamin supplements and imported fish.

That caught the attention of researchers at Harvard University who were studying the importance of fisheries for nutrition. They got in touch and the preliminary findings of their combined research were published in a June article in Nature, which warned that about 11 percent of the Earth’s population could lose out on essential micronutrients as the fish they depend upon disappear.

“Fisheries management has always been about maximising economic return, or sustainable yields to maximise the amount of fish we can take out that can enter the marketplace,” Zeller said. “We argue that we need to see a shift – we need to view marine resources as a health issue.”

How did we get here?

Climate change is exacerbating a problem that is already 70 years in the making.

Since the end of the Second World War, the world’s fisheries have been managed as an inexhaustible economic resource, which drove a massive expansion of industrial fishing. That narrow thinking has brought them to the dire straights they are in today: if fishing continues at the same rate, many stocks around the world will collapse entirely.

In order to reach those startling conclusions, researchers had to look outside commercial fishing data provided by countries to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, which contained holes that obscured the bleak reality of the situation and allowed us to maintain the fiction of endless fisheries.

Fishing could become a distant memory for communities like this one in Thailand. (credit: Vivien Cumming/IRIN)

As grave as the results are, they also offer solutions.

Governments and agencies need to stop looking at global fishing as an economic resource only, and write new policies to manage fisheries better and pull us back from the brink of disaster. Groups advocating on health and environmental issues – including the UN Environment Programme and the World Health Organization – must also lobby for stronger regulations.

There is pressure too on scientists to come up with data that accurately shows the extent of the crisis the world is facing. Zeller and his colleagues at the Sea Around Us project have been attempting to do just that.

Just over a decade ago, they were contracted by the US Fisheries Council in Hawaii to look into how much artisanal and subsistence fishermen were catching in the American Pacific islands.

Most of the data from those fisheries had never been collected before. When the FAO was created at the end of the Second World War and given responsibility to assemble and harmonise national data on fishing, these small-scale fisheries were deemed inconsequential – and that attitude has largely prevailed until today.

When the UBC scientists added what they’d collected from the subsistence and artisanal fisheries in Hawaii, American Samoa, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands, they found that the official catch data was much lower than the reconstructed data that included small-scale fisheries. This suggested that fish stocks were in a much steeper decline than was previously thought.

Zeller started doing similar research on fisheries in Pacific countries that weren’t as well managed as US territories. He found the same results.

“Out of that, we said, ‘Ok, maybe we need to do this for every country in the world,’” he said, and the “catch reconstruction” project was born.

By 2015, the UBC researchers had completed the first ever catch reconstruction database for every country in the world going back six decades. It combined the national data summarised and presented by the FAO with those from unreported fisheries, including subsistence, recreational and artisanal (that is, small scale fisheries supplying local markets), as well as discarded catches from some of the bigger fisheries in each country.

In January this year, Zeller and Pauly published their findings in a paper in Nature Communications. According to the data reported by FAO on behalf of countries, global marine catches peaked at 86 million tonnes in 1996. The Sea Around Us catch reconstruction suggests a peak catch of 130 million tonnes that year.

“We find that reconstructed global catches between 1950 and 2010 were 50 percent higher than data reported to FAO suggest, and are declining more strongly since catches peaked in the 1990s,” they wrote.

Although people from poorer communities will suffer disproportionately as fish stocks collapse, they are not the ones responsible.

“At this point, it is a consequence of overfishing, and mainly overcapacity by the industrial fleets. And most of the industrial fleets are from developed countries,” said Zeller, adding that overcapacity is driven by government subsidies.

China’s fleet in particular has grown rapidly since the 1950s, an expansion literally fuelled by subsidies.

Fuel subsidies accounted for 94 percent of the $6.4 billion that China provided to its fleet in 2013, according to a study published in June in the journal Marine Policy. China is now the world’s largest seafood producer and about 95 percent of its subsidies are “harmful to sustainability”, the study said.

In a 15 April complaint to the World Trade Organization, the US said that China has refused to divulge information about its subsidy programmes.

“The dire state of the world's fisheries has led to calls for greater disciplines on fisheries subsidies that contribute to overfishing and overcapacity,” said the complaint.

While the problem of overfishing due to overcapacity of industrial fleets has been accepted at the WTO and elsewhere, solutions are slow in coming.

Every two years, the FAO convenes a global conference, the Committee on Fisheries. In 2014, COFI adopted voluntary guidelines for the management of small-scale fisheries, an agreement reached after years of advocacy.

“They basically start setting the scene to say that global fisheries is not about industrial fleets roaming the world’s oceans, creating money for rich people or for big fishing companies,” said Zeller. “Fisheries have to be for the local people as a first priority.”

However, the guidelines are not mandatory. A country is not obligated to dismantle its subsidy system in order to halt overfishing and prioritise small-scale fishing communities over industrial fleets.

“Many countries are making strides internally about dealing with these subsidies,” said Zeller. “But the big players such as China and Europe – they don’t.”

‘Runaway train’

Even if the world’s governments could agree on binding measures against the overexploitation of fisheries, they will have to deal with another problem that is far more difficult to manage.

“The one thing that is potentially a runaway train on this is climate change,” said Zeller.

A coral reef in Madagascar is smothered by a plume of sediment (credit: Garth Cripps/Blue Ventures)

The IUCN report drives the point home in stark language that is rare for scientists: “Ocean warming may well turn out to be the greatest hidden challenge of our generation.”

The report noted that even discussions on climate change at the highest levels have neglected the seas. But the warning signs are all around us, in the oceans that comprise 70 percent of the earth’s surface. Last year, ocean temperatures were the warmest in 136 years of records, and that was the fourth time the record had been broken since 2005.

For Zeller, all of this underscores the idea that big economic interests can no longer be the sole arbiters of fisheries management.

“More organisations – within the UN system, within governments – are becoming aware that fisheries is not purely an economic activity,” he said. “It is an environmental issue, and increasingly they will also know that it’s a health issue.”

Despite the glacial pace of policy change, Zeller sees reason for hope as management improves in many countries, and there is a growing understanding of the crisis. More NGOs are becoming involved in advocating for local fishing communities, which puts public pressure on governments.

“So yeah, I am cautiously optimistic,” said Zeller. “I have hope for my son that he will one day still have fish to eat. He’s 11, and he loves going fishing.”

Oceans have absorbed more than 93 percent of the heat generated by human activity since the 1970s, according to a report published this month by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources.

It says a “truly staggering” rise in temperature has caused chaos in the seas: dangerous microbes and cholera-carrying bacteria are breeding in warmer waters, along with toxic algae, which could poison fish and humans that eat them; coral reefs that provide the habitat for a quarter of the world’s marine species are dying; species including turtles, seabirds, and fish are being driven into cooler waters towards the poles.

For experts researching global fisheries, the IUCN report, compiled by 80 scientists in a dozen countries, landed with a dull thud on top of a growing pile of their own studies that show overfishing is already decimating stocks worldwide.

Dirk Zeller, executive director of the Sea Around Us research institute at Vancouver’s University of British Columbia, said it’s hard enough trying to convince countries to scale back fishing to sustainable rates. And as with overfishing, the warming seas won’t affect everyone equally.

"Who are the ones who are really going to pay the price? Poor, developing countries in the tropical zone,” he said in an interview at his UBC office.

After more than a decade of research, Zeller and his colleague Daniel Pauly published damning evidence earlier this year about the true extent of global overfishing. They noted that many people in developing countries depend on fish for protein as well as micronutrients that are essential for health. Locally caught fish are often the only source of those micronutrients, as people do not have access to micronutrients in meat, eggs, vitamin supplements and imported fish.

That caught the attention of researchers at Harvard University who were studying the importance of fisheries for nutrition. They got in touch and the preliminary findings of their combined research were published in a June article in Nature, which warned that about 11 percent of the Earth’s population could lose out on essential micronutrients as the fish they depend upon disappear.

“Fisheries management has always been about maximising economic return, or sustainable yields to maximise the amount of fish we can take out that can enter the marketplace,” Zeller said. “We argue that we need to see a shift – we need to view marine resources as a health issue.”

How did we get here?

Climate change is exacerbating a problem that is already 70 years in the making.

Since the end of the Second World War, the world’s fisheries have been managed as an inexhaustible economic resource, which drove a massive expansion of industrial fishing. That narrow thinking has brought them to the dire straights they are in today: if fishing continues at the same rate, many stocks around the world will collapse entirely.

In order to reach those startling conclusions, researchers had to look outside commercial fishing data provided by countries to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, which contained holes that obscured the bleak reality of the situation and allowed us to maintain the fiction of endless fisheries.

Fishing could become a distant memory for communities like this one in Thailand. (credit: Vivien Cumming/IRIN)

As grave as the results are, they also offer solutions.

Governments and agencies need to stop looking at global fishing as an economic resource only, and write new policies to manage fisheries better and pull us back from the brink of disaster. Groups advocating on health and environmental issues – including the UN Environment Programme and the World Health Organization – must also lobby for stronger regulations.

There is pressure too on scientists to come up with data that accurately shows the extent of the crisis the world is facing. Zeller and his colleagues at the Sea Around Us project have been attempting to do just that.

Just over a decade ago, they were contracted by the US Fisheries Council in Hawaii to look into how much artisanal and subsistence fishermen were catching in the American Pacific islands.

Most of the data from those fisheries had never been collected before. When the FAO was created at the end of the Second World War and given responsibility to assemble and harmonise national data on fishing, these small-scale fisheries were deemed inconsequential – and that attitude has largely prevailed until today.

When the UBC scientists added what they’d collected from the subsistence and artisanal fisheries in Hawaii, American Samoa, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands, they found that the official catch data was much lower than the reconstructed data that included small-scale fisheries. This suggested that fish stocks were in a much steeper decline than was previously thought.

Zeller started doing similar research on fisheries in Pacific countries that weren’t as well managed as US territories. He found the same results.

“Out of that, we said, ‘Ok, maybe we need to do this for every country in the world,’” he said, and the “catch reconstruction” project was born.

By 2015, the UBC researchers had completed the first ever catch reconstruction database for every country in the world going back six decades. It combined the national data summarised and presented by the FAO with those from unreported fisheries, including subsistence, recreational and artisanal (that is, small scale fisheries supplying local markets), as well as discarded catches from some of the bigger fisheries in each country.

In January this year, Zeller and Pauly published their findings in a paper in Nature Communications. According to the data reported by FAO on behalf of countries, global marine catches peaked at 86 million tonnes in 1996. The Sea Around Us catch reconstruction suggests a peak catch of 130 million tonnes that year.

“We find that reconstructed global catches between 1950 and 2010 were 50 percent higher than data reported to FAO suggest, and are declining more strongly since catches peaked in the 1990s,” they wrote.

Although people from poorer communities will suffer disproportionately as fish stocks collapse, they are not the ones responsible.

“At this point, it is a consequence of overfishing, and mainly overcapacity by the industrial fleets. And most of the industrial fleets are from developed countries,” said Zeller, adding that overcapacity is driven by government subsidies.

China’s fleet in particular has grown rapidly since the 1950s, an expansion literally fuelled by subsidies.

Fuel subsidies accounted for 94 percent of the $6.4 billion that China provided to its fleet in 2013, according to a study published in June in the journal Marine Policy. China is now the world’s largest seafood producer and about 95 percent of its subsidies are “harmful to sustainability”, the study said.

In a 15 April complaint to the World Trade Organization, the US said that China has refused to divulge information about its subsidy programmes.

“The dire state of the world's fisheries has led to calls for greater disciplines on fisheries subsidies that contribute to overfishing and overcapacity,” said the complaint.

While the problem of overfishing due to overcapacity of industrial fleets has been accepted at the WTO and elsewhere, solutions are slow in coming.

Every two years, the FAO convenes a global conference, the Committee on Fisheries. In 2014, COFI adopted voluntary guidelines for the management of small-scale fisheries, an agreement reached after years of advocacy.

“They basically start setting the scene to say that global fisheries is not about industrial fleets roaming the world’s oceans, creating money for rich people or for big fishing companies,” said Zeller. “Fisheries have to be for the local people as a first priority.”

However, the guidelines are not mandatory. A country is not obligated to dismantle its subsidy system in order to halt overfishing and prioritise small-scale fishing communities over industrial fleets.

“Many countries are making strides internally about dealing with these subsidies,” said Zeller. “But the big players such as China and Europe – they don’t.”

‘Runaway train’

Even if the world’s governments could agree on binding measures against the overexploitation of fisheries, they will have to deal with another problem that is far more difficult to manage.

“The one thing that is potentially a runaway train on this is climate change,” said Zeller.

A coral reef in Madagascar is smothered by a plume of sediment (credit: Garth Cripps/Blue Ventures)

The IUCN report drives the point home in stark language that is rare for scientists: “Ocean warming may well turn out to be the greatest hidden challenge of our generation.”

The report noted that even discussions on climate change at the highest levels have neglected the seas. But the warning signs are all around us, in the oceans that comprise 70 percent of the earth’s surface. Last year, ocean temperatures were the warmest in 136 years of records, and that was the fourth time the record had been broken since 2005.

For Zeller, all of this underscores the idea that big economic interests can no longer be the sole arbiters of fisheries management.

“More organisations – within the UN system, within governments – are becoming aware that fisheries is not purely an economic activity,” he said. “It is an environmental issue, and increasingly they will also know that it’s a health issue.”

Despite the glacial pace of policy change, Zeller sees reason for hope as management improves in many countries, and there is a growing understanding of the crisis. More NGOs are becoming involved in advocating for local fishing communities, which puts public pressure on governments.

“So yeah, I am cautiously optimistic,” said Zeller. “I have hope for my son that he will one day still have fish to eat. He’s 11, and he loves going fishing.”

The allegations that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction are lies.

I retired in 2010 after a 27-year career with the CIA and for the first 20 years of my career, I was a senior political and media analyst with the CIA’s open source arm. That department monitors and translates speeches by foreign leaders, newspaper editorials and other foreign news of interest to US policymakers.

Our job was to analyze the speeches of foreign leaders and the political spin of foreign media content and help the policymakers we worked with understand the implications for US policy and interests. It was exciting, challenging and very interesting work.

In early 2003, just prior to the launching of the US attack on Iraq, I was the senior analyst in charge of Iraqi media at the Open Source Center. The political atmosphere around the Beltway had become very charged amid allegations that Saddam Husayn possessed WMD and there were active efforts afoot to link him to al-Qa’ida and the events of 9-11. The drumbeat for war was in full swing.

One morning I received a telephone call from the office of then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz asking us to find media reportage of meetings between al-Qaida representatives and Iraqi officials. There was a strong implication in the way the tasking was conveyed to me that a meeting between the two sides had, in fact, taken place - possibly in Prague - and that we needed to find the evidence.

I gave the tasking my highest priority. I immediately contacted our overseas bureau in the Middle East in charge of monitoring and translating Iraqi media. We had the monitors/translators undertake an exhaustive search of all relevant Iraqi media reports in our archives that might contain such information. We also leveraged other resources available to us in Baghdad so that they could check on lesser known Iraq media sources - we pulled out all the stops.

About 2 weeks later, we received a definitive response - there was no evidence in Iraqi media of any such relationship between al-Qaida and Saddam Husayn’s regime. I promptly reported this information to Wolfowitz’s office. I assumed that was the end of the matter.

However, about a week later Wolfowitz’s office phoned us again, asking for the same thing - media evidence of an Iraqi government link with al-Qaida. So I again marshaled all the resources we had and dedicated some of our overseas staff to a full-time search. Again the finding was negative.

Again I reported this back. Unbelievably, a few weeks the request came to us a third time. It was slowly dawning on me that we were not providing his office with the answer they wanted. We were being subjected to political pressure. We had already expended many hours and many US tax dollars on this search - and I trusted our seasoned media professionals when they said there was no evidence of these allegations.

So I asked Wolfowitz’s office where they had heard that a meeting between al-Qa’ida and Iraqi officials had taken place - in the hopes that this might aid our search. However, I never received a response to my request.

Of course, we now know that these allegations were pure fiction, as were the allegations that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction.

By 2006 - three years into the war on Iraq — the Bush administration officially admitted it had no evidence of any Iraqi role in the 9-11 attacks. Nevertheless, the US continues to devastate that country, to this very day.

It is time to face the truth and hold our leaders to account for the terrible war crimes committed against the Iraqi people. And it is time for the United States to withdraw from Iraq and allow the Iraqi people to rebuild their country free of foreign interference.

That is why I have shared my experience with The People's Tribunal on the Iraq War – as my testimony to the lies that led to the mass murder of so many innocent people. It is my hope that the truth uncovered by the Tribunal will enable a national reckoning and help us hold our leaders accountable for the past and present war crimes committed against the nation of Iraq – crimes which could not have been committed in the absence of the lies that were told to the American people.

The allegations that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction are lies.

I retired in 2010 after a 27-year career with the CIA and for the first 20 years of my career, I was a senior political and media analyst with the CIA’s open source arm. That department monitors and translates speeches by foreign leaders, newspaper editorials and other foreign news of interest to US policymakers.

Our job was to analyze the speeches of foreign leaders and the political spin of foreign media content and help the policymakers we worked with understand the implications for US policy and interests. It was exciting, challenging and very interesting work.

In early 2003, just prior to the launching of the US attack on Iraq, I was the senior analyst in charge of Iraqi media at the Open Source Center. The political atmosphere around the Beltway had become very charged amid allegations that Saddam Husayn possessed WMD and there were active efforts afoot to link him to al-Qa’ida and the events of 9-11. The drumbeat for war was in full swing.

One morning I received a telephone call from the office of then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz asking us to find media reportage of meetings between al-Qaida representatives and Iraqi officials. There was a strong implication in the way the tasking was conveyed to me that a meeting between the two sides had, in fact, taken place - possibly in Prague - and that we needed to find the evidence.

I gave the tasking my highest priority. I immediately contacted our overseas bureau in the Middle East in charge of monitoring and translating Iraqi media. We had the monitors/translators undertake an exhaustive search of all relevant Iraqi media reports in our archives that might contain such information. We also leveraged other resources available to us in Baghdad so that they could check on lesser known Iraq media sources - we pulled out all the stops.

About 2 weeks later, we received a definitive response - there was no evidence in Iraqi media of any such relationship between al-Qaida and Saddam Husayn’s regime. I promptly reported this information to Wolfowitz’s office. I assumed that was the end of the matter.

However, about a week later Wolfowitz’s office phoned us again, asking for the same thing - media evidence of an Iraqi government link with al-Qaida. So I again marshaled all the resources we had and dedicated some of our overseas staff to a full-time search. Again the finding was negative.

Again I reported this back. Unbelievably, a few weeks the request came to us a third time. It was slowly dawning on me that we were not providing his office with the answer they wanted. We were being subjected to political pressure. We had already expended many hours and many US tax dollars on this search - and I trusted our seasoned media professionals when they said there was no evidence of these allegations.

So I asked Wolfowitz’s office where they had heard that a meeting between al-Qa’ida and Iraqi officials had taken place - in the hopes that this might aid our search. However, I never received a response to my request.

Of course, we now know that these allegations were pure fiction, as were the allegations that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction.

By 2006 - three years into the war on Iraq — the Bush administration officially admitted it had no evidence of any Iraqi role in the 9-11 attacks. Nevertheless, the US continues to devastate that country, to this very day.

It is time to face the truth and hold our leaders to account for the terrible war crimes committed against the Iraqi people. And it is time for the United States to withdraw from Iraq and allow the Iraqi people to rebuild their country free of foreign interference.

That is why I have shared my experience with The People's Tribunal on the Iraq War – as my testimony to the lies that led to the mass murder of so many innocent people. It is my hope that the truth uncovered by the Tribunal will enable a national reckoning and help us hold our leaders accountable for the past and present war crimes committed against the nation of Iraq – crimes which could not have been committed in the absence of the lies that were told to the American people.

Related Stories

]]>
http://www.alternet.org/world/you-wont-believe-what-country-trump-thinks-great-or-how-press-found-outWait, What? Trump Now Thinks Country He Once Maligned Is 'Fantastic' Because Its Leader Flattered Himhttp://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/236829034/0/alternet_world

The media found out about this congratulatory phone call and full reversal in a rather unusual way.

Donald Trump has shifted his position on Pakistan, a country he called "a very, very vital problem" during his presidential campaign, based apparently on a brief congratulatory phone call from its leader.

"Pakistan is a very, very vital problem for us, because they have a thing called nuclear weapons," Trump told CNN's Anderson Cooper in a GOP Town Hall during the campaign.

Apparently, he's done an about-face, a fact that the media found about in a rather unconventional way.

On Monday, Pakistan's government published apparent excerpts from a phone call with Pakistan’s prime minister, Muhammad Nawaz Sharif, who had called President-elect Trump to congratulate him.

The media found out about this congratulatory phone call and full reversal in a rather unusual way.

Donald Trump has shifted his position on Pakistan, a country he called "a very, very vital problem" during his presidential campaign, based apparently on a brief congratulatory phone call from its leader.

"Pakistan is a very, very vital problem for us, because they have a thing called nuclear weapons," Trump told CNN's Anderson Cooper in a GOP Town Hall during the campaign.

Apparently, he's done an about-face, a fact that the media found about in a rather unconventional way.

On Monday, Pakistan's government published apparent excerpts from a phone call with Pakistan’s prime minister, Muhammad Nawaz Sharif, who had called President-elect Trump to congratulate him.